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Searchme Stack demo...

One of the things I was really pleased to get into the current presentation of T184, our online short course on robotics, were a handful of embedded video clips from Youtube. The presentation of the assets isn't that pretty, but I'm starting to learn about what battles to fight when (!;-) so it was enough just to the embedding sorted without worrying to much about beautiful page design/layout, media player customisation, and so on...

The pages as currently constructed owe a lot to the styling and layout of a printed page (many students do allegedly print out online/HTML materials for offline reading) and an old old page template...), so things like images are also embedded in the page in what at (on my off days) I consider to be a quite inelegant way:

So when I saw the recent "stack" demo from the searchme visual search engine, I started wondering about whether this could be a way of putting a multiple image and video payload into a single gallery window on a page?

(There are issues regarding printing the page out or course, particularly if the gallery is just an image gallery - I don't think the searchme widget will 'linearise' the images for a print display?!)

So as T184 comes up to ts last presentation (in its current form....) in October, I wonder about how we might use this sort of display in the context of online teaching materials? Here's the simplest of demos, showing a mixed collection of assets on a theme (click through to the post to see demo of an embedded stack. Or here's a direct link to the stack: Automata stack (searchme).

One of the biggest queries I have about this approach, though, is with respect to rights (which regular readers know I don't understand at all!). The widget embeds a set of user selected results from a search engine collected as a results set on a third party site, and viewed in an embedded third party widget. So if rights clearance is sought for images that appear in a stack, what clearance is necessary? If anyone was tracking usage of images pulled from the flickr server, it would resolve back to the searchme stack address presumably, rather than the page that the stack widget is embedded in?

And what if searchme offered embeddable 'saved search' stacks (that displays the results of a particular search query)? You wouldn't know for sure what images were going to be pulled back into and displayed in the widget (though you might craft the search query in such a way as to maximise the chances of pulling in a set of images you are particularly interested in!).

So I guess what's got me thinking is this: to what extent do embedding results from visual search engines cause grief for the rights folks?

I don't know if the searchme visual search limits searches to Creative Commons licensed images, but it would be good if it was an option, and even better if it could generate a 'titles' slide to show attribution to the images in the stack at the end of the stack!

Tags: searchme, visual search, widget

Posted by ajh59 at June 25, 2008 08:37 PM