Joost and Metadata
There’s been a lot of focus on both the promise and likely pitfalls of Joost’s attempt to bring television to the web. But this post emphasizes that all the focus on the multimedia aspect of the effort misses what may well be Joost’s killer feature: its metadata support.
They have a lot of really good people working on building out a killer metadata system based on open standards like RDF, and exploiting open source code. Moreover, they are contributing back to the open source world (witness TripleSoup at the Apache Foundation).
Janko speculates on the goals:
So what can these metadata frameworks be used for? Timestamped comments and tags are certainly one interesting possibility. Combine this with FOAF-like social networking structures, and you got yourself a whole new way to explore TV programming.
Perhaps Joost will be RDF’s first recognized “killer app”?
