Veotag adds to emerging trend of 'deep-tagging'

Yesterday, I wrote about Gotuit's SceneMaker, a new tool for "deep-tagging" YouTube and Metacafe videos: pointing out notable moments within clips, and even splicing them so that portions of a longer video can be shared. The larger concept of deep-tagging is, to me, really interesting. In 2006, we saw an explosion of tagging functions just about everywhere, but is something like SceneMaker an indication that regular tagging just isn't enough?

It's a likely possibility. Because, as I learned at last night's New York Web 2.0 Social Networking Tech Meetup, Gotuit isn't the only company with the same idea. The meetup featured a presentation from Veotag, another Web video start-up that's trying to introduce a new generation of tagging by letting video viewers insert commentary and divide media into segments. (Veotag calls them "chapters." Gotuit says "scenes." Same thing.) In addition, Veotag works with audio files, like podcasts.

But Veotag isn't a clone of SceneMaker, even beyond its dual functionality with both audio and video files. Veotag has a distinct--and very interesting--focus on search engine optimization, or SEO. A media site like a news or entertainment outlet can Veotag its content (yup, it's a verb, too) and the content of the tags will appear in search engine results. But on the consumer side, regular Web media fans are encouraged to Veotag their favorite online videos and add to the site's library.

There are some problems, of course, several of which arose during audience commentary at last night's meetup. The biggest one is that multiple users can't work with the same set of Veotags: if two users Veotag the same video or audio clip, it'll emerge as two separate sets of tags. Clearly, there are some kinks to be ironed out. But can't that be said for just about everything these days?