(2012-08-09) Live Event Time Machine Discussion Clusters

This Brain Fart Of The Day was inspired by

• kerfuffle over NBC doing Time Delay of Olympics coverage
• that our family is just getting around to watching that coverage a week later because The Wife was on a biz-trip
• the late-night Live Event of the Curiosity Rover landing
• systems that create a Discussion Forum thread around every paragraph of a document

Idea: create virtual Time Machine of MicroBlogging synchronizing the moment of an event that the user is viewing to other comments made by other people viewing that same real-time moment, regardless of when they commented.

Logistically, this would obviously be easiest to implement in an online-streaming experience. So we'll focus on that model for now, and leave the design of a DVR/Second Screen protocol as an exercise for the reader...

As the event is being recorded, a human would click a button at each "event moment", essentially a change that might trigger a cluster of comments.

• For instance, even with a single camera recording the opening ceremony parade from a single point-of-view, as each new country came into view, that would trigger a state-change.
• Alternatively, you could just automatically generate a new state every minute.
• As a 3rd method, an agent could look at the clustering of comments from real-time viewers, and trigger a state-change at the beginning of each new cluster.

Then, over time, as other people watch the stream, the comments they post are time-stamped with the time the stream is at. So even-later viewers will see comments appear in the time-order of the real-event-time they were posted.

This model would work for all TV-stream-viewing.

Downsides

• It wouldn't be interactive, in the sense that you could reply to other commenters and have them see/reply, etc.
• You would be seeing all comments (made at a given time), vs just your friends. (In theory that's solvable, but a pain.)
• Anyone could "go back in time" to enter spoilers.

Updates

• cf TED Video transcript UI
• Sound Cloud lets you attach a comment to each second of a tune
• I understand that Pop Corn makes it easy to do timestamped notes - 2011-03-01-HtmlHackingTools