BBC Annotatable Audio

Tom Coates describes a currently internal BBC intitative to have everyone annotate audio content flikr style. This is a very cool application and is like a real world (as in non-academic) application of the kind of shared annotation we want to enable in our eResearch project. It’s probably what the people at Dart would like to enable, or at least that was my understanding of one of their goals.

This and all the Ajax stuff around makes me wonder if we can’t do decent in-browser speech annotation these days. The new tag in Firefox 1.5 (and earlier Safaris) would make drawing arbitrary graphics simple; it's then a matter of delivering the right content to the browser from some annotation backend. Data for the waveform and for the annotations to be drawn, all bits of XML delivered from an AG based backend or some such.