Social search is something that has gained a lot of attention and business activity in the past year, especially from Yahoo! (Flickr, MyWeb, 360). The next logical place for social search is video, and it already has been applied to some degree by sites such as YouTube.

Om Malik reports on a site called Dabble that is taking this concept to the next level. Like Yahoo!'s MyWeb 2.0, and del.icio.us, the service lets users tag and bookmark video clips that will be displayed on personalized pages. From there users can do things such as create video playlists and share with friends.

The benefits of social search include the cost savings and effectiveness of having users do the "heavy lifting" of indexing content. This could apply especially well to video because there will be lots of it (user-generated and long-tail content on which sites like YouTube thrive — kind of like Flickr), and because video content has proved difficult to tag and index using software. Advertiser benefits are also present, as more human participation enables better behavioral targeting.

We'll further explore social search and its place within the emerging online video space in an upcoming White Paper.