Alex Williams reports from Corante EventLab about a fascinating complementary product to FlashMeeting called FlashMeeting Memo, that allows you to directly reference a section of a live session recording contributed by any one of the participants.

This feature has much more important implications than, for example, the ability to reference any individual paragraph or section in a rich text-based document. While a text document can be "scanned" easily, a rich media file, like an audio or a video recording, cannot be easily browsed yet.

However, by allowing granular referencing down to the level of each individual voice intervention, while adding the ability to create a unique URL for each one, a vast number of opportunities for the effective use of live event recordings are opened up.

"FlashMeeting is a web-based video conferencing application that makes it possible to link to the sound byte or audio clip that you want.

I can set up a meeting with 25 people or so, each with their own video feed.

Each time someone speaks, a new link is created. One person speaks at a time.

Once the meeting or event is complete, I can annotate each individual clip. I can publicize the individual clip, the full event and a summary of what each person said.

Here are some examples from an interview I did with Elizabeth Allbrycht and Guillaume duGardier, the producers of New Communications Forum, a conference about blogging for public relations professionals, taking place January 26-27 in Napa and early April in Paris. Corante is conducting a True Voice show at the NewComm Forum.

Here’s a link to a part of the interview, where Elizabeth and Guillaume discuss the impacts blogs are having on the field of public relations. Unless I fully summarized and provided an exact time stamp, the viewer would have to watch the entire interivew to hear this aspect of the interview.

You can also publish the full listings of all the clips and the annotations for people to see. Each clip is annotated so the viewer gets some idea of what they are going to see. Here is an example of the "minutes," feature from the interview with Elizabeth and Guillaume.

You can also just listen to the entire interview. In this view, the viewer also has the option of going to the individual clips, the annotations or just listening to the entire interview.

These features make interviews far more useful than traditional audio and video archives. They put the content in the control of the user. You may easily discover the gleaming nuggets that remain hidden deep in the recording.

Yes, you can fast forward and back if you play the show in the media player you use. But that feature is really unnecessary as most of the time you have no clue what you are trying to find.

You need annotations and references to each audio clip for ..."

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