Technology developed by Blinkx, the video search company, can perhaps be an answer to the growing concerns over unwanted video content on the Internet. That is because Blinkx crawler virtually sees the content of the video that it is trying to tag and categorize for search purposes. The crawler technology visualizes and analyses the clip – like a human eye would do, according to the company - and accordingly stores the information in an index that is accessed in the retrieval mechanism to obtain the results.
There are several among us that are concerned about the unwanted video content on the Internet. Adult video content is obviously at the top of the list. May be the level of concern varies across cultures but these issues have to be dealt with in a sensitive manner across societies. Unfortunately we have not come up with a mechanism to really filter things properly. At most the adult websites will carry a statutory warning that you have to be over 18 in order to access the content. Neither that nor the parental control software has proven to carry out filtering adequately.
Perhaps integrating Blinkx technology with a web browser would do the job. While the video is being downloaded, Blinkx technology (if it has not already categorized the clip as an adult theme) can analyze the clip contents and pop up some message. I am sure Blinkx would have support of several governments around the world to implement something like this.