My son was featured in yesterday’s Sunday New York Times in an article (At First, Funny videos. Now, a Reference Tool) about the unforeseen use of YouTube as a research tool. We all associate videos with entertainment but Tyler has taught me that with the addition of meta-data and micro-chunked content, it’s possible to use YouTube as a rich source of reference material.

I was contacted by the reporter, who had seen a post on ReadWriteWeb about Tyler’s use of YouTube and wanted to bring the story to the New York Times’ readers.

My father commented, “It is the inclination of succeeding generations to simplify.” Tyler is on to something. For certain things (contact juggling, macarena, or bugatti vs. fighter jet), YouTube is going to explain things to you better and quicker than plain old text search results. You can sort by not only Relevance and Date Added but also using meta-data from community actions such as Ratings and View Count. Finally, using the example from the article, if you search on platypus, embedded in the results is a pre-defined playlist of over 40 video clips all about the animal.

Tyler was pleased to see that the article was in the “Bright Ideas” section. His comment about his pose in the photo was that after over 200 photos his head was feeling a little heavy. Strangely, the local newsstand didn’t carry the Sunday Times so we had to go to a Starbucks to get a copy for the photo above and as a keepsake.

Robert Langman left a comment on my previous post about meta-data at nytimes.com with a link to a couple of cool mashups that use keywords on the older archive of New York Times material, the paper from 1851 through the early 1900′s.

Check it out here.

The New York Times has a blog about open source projects and today they shed a little more light on all the wonderful metadata that they make available for folks like Dave Winer to build upon. I sense an open source news hack day coming on.

Yahoo has joined up with the folks at the New York Times crosswords to promote the new Search Assist feature with a contest. The idea is that you fill the puzzle out successfully and you too can be entered into a drawing for one of five trips to Hawaii. Thing is, this thing is a gimme. Next to each clue is a link to a “Hint” which runs a search in the pane below against Yahoo’s Search Assist which will serve things up for you right there and then. It’s a great way to show off the new Search Assist and may give you a new reason to work on your crosswords with the browser handy.

I found out about this via a new group on Facebook. Join Yahoo! Pilot if you want to find out about the latest stuff going on at Yahoo! I can’t believe I found something not written up by the folks over at Yahoo! Cool thing of the Day, my usual source for tweaks and trivia about Yahoo – must have caught them asleep at the switch!

Dave Winer looks to the recently released New York Times archives as rich loam of fertile content upon which many applications can be built. In another life, as a product manager for factiva.com, I came to appreciate the meta-data the Times would attach to their content as something Factiva would leverage for its clients. Factiva provided investment banks and corporate libraries with content feeds from major news outlets and used meta-data on their sources (often adding additional meta-data of its own) so their clients would get precisely the content they were interested in and avoid having to wade through irrelevant results that were often the result of blunt keyword searches.

If the global PR officers of Ford or Sharp were looking for breaking news stories, keyword searches on the internet would be nearly useless as they would pull in stories of used Ford cars for sale or someone’s “sharp” looking suit. These client would pay for the meta-data and Factiva’s taxonomy consultants would offer numerous tips & tricks to hone down their filters to find exactly what was required.

With this in mind, I took a quick look at the source on the New York Times stories and found that they contain much of the meta-data that I remember.

Today’s story on Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s speech at the UN contains the following meta tags:

• byl= Warren Hoge
• des= International Relations;Embargoes and Economic Sanctions;Atomic Weapons
• per=Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud
• org=United Nations;Security Counci
• geo= Iran

A business article on the arrival of the Microsoft game Halo 3 has the following:

• byl=Seth Schiesel
• des=Computer and Video Games;Computers and the Internet
• per=Gates, Bill
• org=Microsoft Corp;Sony Corp;Nintendo Company Limited
• ticker=Microsoft Corp|MSFT|NASDAQ;Best Buy Company Incorporated|BBY|NYSE;Sony Corp|SNE|NYSE;Nintendo Company Limited|NTDOY|other-OTC;GameStop Corporation|GME|NYSE;Circuit City Stores Inc|CC|NYSE

From this we can see elements of the nytimes.com taxonomy poke through.

• byl – is the byline of the author of the story
• des – the description and how this story is classified by the New York Times
• per – nodes for individuals
• org – company or organizational nodes
• ticker – public company stock symbols and their listing exchange

I’ve only just started playing around with this but using text from the meta-data fields and your favorite search engine you can already start to sort results in interesting ways.

1. Articles about Mahmoud Ahmedinejad
2. Articles about Gates, Bill
3. News about Nintendo

It’s still early days as it appears that the search engines have not crawled the archives completely and a quick check of older articles are lacking in most of this meta-data. It will be interesting to see what insights skillful use of the meta-data fields will yield over the next few weeks and what applications can be built on top of them.