Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Google may never call itself a semantic web company, but yesterday it plunged a bit deeper into the space. The search engine leader announced in a blog posting that it is announcing support for Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa.

Calling it one of the first in a best-practice series of posts, Google plans to create around hosting video content, product manager Michael Cohen of Google’s Video Search team says the effort will help increase the chances of videos on web sites appearing in Google results. Both the Facebook Share and Yahoo! SearchMonkey RDFa markup formats allow webmasters to specify information essential to video indexing, such as a video’s title and description, within the HTML of a video page, he writes.

Being able to semantically categorize video is becoming a must for content providers to succeed in the increasingly video-oriented web world: There’s a growing appetite for watching video online. According to comScore’s Video Metrix service, in July more than 158 million viewers watched an average of 135 videos online. That’s the largest video audience ever recorded by the service.

Google sites continued to rank as the top U.S. video properties that month, with 8.9 billion videos viewed – 42 percent of all videos viewed online. YouTube accounted for almost all the videos viewed at Google. In all, 81 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online videos, racking up an average 8.3 hours over the month. While it’s unclear where these people get the time to watch all that video, clearly it will be more important for webmasters to cut through the noise and ensure that the videos they’re posting will figure into such consumption figures.

Also on the list of comScore’s top 10 video content properties for July were Microsoft sites, Fox Interactive Media, Yahoo!, Viacom Digital, Hulu, Turner Network, CBS Interactive, AOL and Facebook. There are some big names in there, but of course video also is becoming an integral part of the picture for small content provider properties and blogs. There’s a big opportunity, for example, for web sites that hone in on valuable niche audiences to capitalize on the use of online videos to draw more of those targeted eyeballs with more rich media content. That’s one reason for search engine optimization and marketing businesses that support such clients to like what Google is doing.

Other technologies are contributing to the advance of video publishing, with some estimates noting that in less than five years Internet video will account for more than 90 percent of all consumer traffic. For example, Delve Networks, which uses semantic and natural language processing technology to help publishers monetize video content with better search and navigation, this summer teamed up with Akamai Technologies to enable a video management solution utilizing the latter’s global network. It’s aimed at being a hosted turnkey solution that lets users build custom online video applications and publish the video online, including encoding, content management, syndication and analytics.

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