Veotag allows you to add this functionality to any of your video or audio from within their embeddable player. You can upload content (WMV, FLV, mp3) from your computer or via URL. Anyone can sign up for an account, upload content, publish, and start tagging points in the programming. The Veotag player wraps around the content, displaying time stamped comments along the right hand side that link to interesting segments, as chosen by the publisher. You can see an example of the player on a speech by Guy Kawasaki here.

Veotag has a search engine for the tags, which is also indexed by the major search engines. This index can then be transmitted to an ad serving engine for targeted advertising around the audio or video.

Readers interested in incorporating deep tagging into their own media should also check out Click.tv’s video deep tagging widget with comments.

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A few startups are focusing on creating transcriptions of podcasts and video content (see Pluggd and Podzinger, for example), which search engines can then index.

And many people are tagging audio, video and photo content. YouTube, Flickr and others allow this (and see Google’s efforts to tag photos using humans). Tags help describe the content and are usable by search engines as well as humans. But highest level tags, when they are present, don’t capture all of the content, so a lot is missed.

Figuring out how to search the meta data around rich content (tags and lots of other descriptive data) is big business. Truveo, a video search startup that launched in 2005 and was subsequently acquired by AOL for at least $50 million, helped solve this problem (but still falls woefully short of perfect). A new unlaunched startup, CastTV, takes rich media searching another few steps forward (much more on them in a later post). But even these new search companies can’t find all of the content in a video or audio file, and certainly can’t take you right to where that content is presented.

That’s why I like the idea of deep tagging. It requires human labor but for many publishers it’s worth it. Instead of simply being associated with a file, a deep tag is associated with a clip from the file. Click on the tag and jump right to that part of the clip.

We’ve covered a few companies that are facilitating deep tagging, such as MotionBox, JumpCut (acquired by Yahoo last week), Viddler and Click.tv. Also, Google recently added a captioning feature to video, as well as the ability to permanently link to any time spot in a clip.

Veotag is doing this as well (we haven’t covered them yet but a few commenters have pointed them out in the past). Today I received an email from Howard Seibel, Veotag’s VP Marketing. He pointed me to this page which is a better version of a TalkCrunch podcast I recorded last week with Om Malik and Robert Scoble. He’s added deep tagging, so listeners can jump right to certain parts of the show.

I like the fact that I can embed the Veotag player right into the TalkCrunch website, and people who listen to the podcast on the site can utilize the deep tags (right now we have a simple Flash player). I’m having our trusty analyst Nick Gonzalez look into integrating Veotag into TalkCrunch sometime soon. If you know of other startups addressing deep tagging, please let us know.

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