The Washington Post has a neat feature called Mixed Messages in which they have archived televised campaign ads and archived them according to various criteria, such as state, party, characters, topics, narrator gender and so on. I can just imagine the editors gathered around discussing whether or not to include hairstyles as a category.
This feature is an excellent example of the power of categorizing content that would usually just be dumped onto a site, that is, if anyone even saw the value of putting it up in the first place.
Furthermore, it’s a great example of what kind of video works online, as opposed to the usual “talking head-only” formula found on TV station Web sites.
[Thanks to Cory L. Armstrong]
That is a remarkable feature. Credit goes to Adrian Holovaty and his team. The Post is rapidly becoming the best multimedia product in journalism…and Adrian is the reason.
Thanks for the nice words, Danny and Paul! The lion’s share of the credit goes to our online politics team, led by Jason Manning. They’re the ones who did the hard work of finding, watching and classifying all of those ads. And they continue to do so — the team has already added more than 40 ads since we launched a couple of weeks ago.
We just added some more capabilities to the database today: spots in the database for longform text analysis of the ads. Stay tuned! The fun part about these projects is that they’re works in progress.