The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Computer-based systems and applications permit playing videos and entering comments on the videos. For example, the YouTube service enables registered users to create and store comments that are associated with stored videos. However, current techniques for creating and storing comments or annotations relating to digital video programs are limited in their utility. Typically it is difficult to correlate a particular comment with a precise location in the digital video program. The standard approach has been for the person writing the comment to specify a location in the comment by writing, for example, “At 9:21 the cat starts playing the piano”—referring to a point approximately nine minutes and twenty-one seconds after the start of the video. However, the time references in this type of comment are inaccurate.
Further, the topics in successive comments of this type, entered by different users, may be completely different. It is usually difficult or impossible to correlate multiple comments relating to the same topic or of the same type. There is also no way to indicate that a particular comment relates to a public taxonomy or other organizational scheme relating to topics or tags.