Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates. - Gore Vidal
Truveo Press Release
A press release last week, announced the Truveo launch of a comprehensive Presidential Election video site. According to the press release:
Truveo's election site includes pages for each of the leading candidates in the Democratic and Republican primary races: Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama on the Democratic side and Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Mitt Romney on the Republican side. The site also has pages for coverage from national, international and local sources as well as the ever-popular late night shows.
The election site draws on Truveo's index of over 100 million videos which includes videos from national media sources such as ABC, AP, CBS, CNBC, CNN, C-SPAN, FOX, NBC and more; international media sources such as the BBC, DIE ZEIT, El Pais, EuroNews, France24, Reuters, SPIEGEL, The Sun, TF1, ZDF and more; local television and newspapers in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Jacksonville, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and many other cities; late night shows such as A Daily Show (aka The Daily Show when its writers are not on strike) and The Colbert Report; and Internet sites such as Politico.com, Blip.tv, Dailymotion, Metacafe, MySpace, Veoh, and YouTube.
The Election Video Widget
This press release got me thinking! I’ve written about Truveo before here and here. In a recent article I discussed TruveoCast, a Dashboard widget to search the video favorites of a Truveo user. The Truveo API provides search filters to limit video type, runtime, quality, bitrate, format, site, days_old, and file_size. You can read more about the search filters here: http://developer.truveo.com/UsingFilters.php. I chose to illustrate the format search filters. The getSearchFilter function creates the filter parameters to limit the video formats returned by the search. Searching for video favorites is accomplished by a basic Truveo search.
My plan is to modify the searching in the current widget to search for videos related to the presidential election. For example to find all of the videos related to Barack Obama, in the News category, from the past 7 days – the following Truveo search could be used:
"barack obama" category:news days_old:7
My plan is to modify the search in TruveoCast to return all the recent news about the presidential election over the past week. So the following query would accomplish that:
"presidential election" category:news days_old:7
It should be fairly straightforward to modify the existing search in TruveoCast, to turn it into a Presidental Election video source on the Dashboard. I’ll show the code next week – so in preparation read up on the following: