Andrew Golis

YouTube’s “CitizenTube” blog explains how an editor in Australia was able to find all the words to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” to create “Barack-roll”:

But did you know that the video wouldn’t have been possible without Google’s Election Video Search Gadget? Released in July to great reviews, the gadget allows you to type any word into a search engine and not just get a list of all of the political speeches that contain that word, but within each video, yellow markers allow you to jump to the relevant part of the speech where the word comes up.

“I’d had the idea for the video for a few months before [the gadget was released], but had no real way of tracking down all of the right words,” Hugh Atkins, the creator of “Barack Roll,” recently told Citizentube. “Being able to search for particular words and know when they appeared in a given clip made the whole project feasible.”

When toys exist, people use them.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 10:33 am and is filed under media, politics, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.