www.suraha.com - Social Podcast Bookmarking

Session Ring Leaders - Raghotham Murthy, Michi Mutsuzaki

Number of attendees : 11

Motivation

• The motivation for starting suraha came from the search for class videos and online lectures at stanford.
• Typically the lectures go on for an hour or more. For eg., in a math lecture, if there is a theorem proof in the middle of the lecture, there is no way to get to the exact proof other than by scanning the video.
• For the class videos, time tagging is present now but it does not solve the above mentioned problem of extracting a particular snippet of a video file.
• www.suraha.com was started to enable tagging video/audio snippets with particular topics/keywords

What does 'suraha' mean

• The word 'suraha' comes from Sanskrit language and it means 'humans'.

Who uses suraha

• Currently suraha is used by Raghu and his friends at stanford for watching class videos.
• However there are many users on suraha who are referred by google.
• Currently the number of page views for suraha are in the order of a couple thousand per day

What can you do on suraha

• Submit your podcast feeds
• Tag podcasts ( items/channels )
• Search for podcasts
• Rate podcasts
• View most popular/top rated podcasts

Challenges

• Dealing with different formats of audio/video content
• Right now there is no unified way to play different audio/video formats.
• Raghu and Michi are trying to see if they can convert to a certain common format on the fly..

Thoughts from the attendees

• Swamy from qlipmedia mentioned about blinkx search engine for multimedia content. He also spoke about how in qlipmedia each message would be equivalent to an episode in the podcast context
• Some of the other thoughts from audience were :
  • How are tags managed in suraha.
  • Tags could mean different things to different people. Do users rank tags?
  • Some more discussion on tag clouds
  • Can tags be added to the media files themselves instead of storing them outside the media files?
• Raghu and Michi said that currently they do not really do any tag management (canonicalization etc) or let users rank tags. As long as search does not do an exact match on the tags, the actual tags need not be canonicalized.
• At the end of the session, two of the audience were interested in submitting their podcast on kids summercamp to suraha.
• Currently, you need to register on suraha before submitting a podcast and the registration process is quite simple where the user needs to provide their name and email address