When a monsoon hit the Philippine capital of Manila on Monday, causing widespread floods that have so far affected more than 2 million people and killed at least 60, YouTube searches for the Philippines spiked over 70% as people around the world tried to watch the latest crisis coverage.
YouTube users searching for "Philippines flood" during the tragic event may have noticed something new: a special white box at the top of the search results page, presenting recent, relevant footage of the disaster.
This new tool, called the Crisis Response One Box, is a joint effort from YouTube and Storyful, a news agency which provides streams of verified social content. The tool curates the most up-to-date videos and information on major crises and disasters. YouTube implemented it for the first time on Monday, once news of the floods broke. The box also includes text information and resources, including links to Google's Crisis Response project and related news.
"Information can be hard to find in the immediate aftermath of a major crisis," Olivia Ma, YouTube's news and politics manager, told Mashable. "We thought it would be useful to make high-quality content — including news videos, articles surfaced via Google News and Google's Crisis Response resources — easy to find on YouTube in a timely manner."
Ma explained that the Crisis Response One Box includes three types of content: a curated playlist of videos, a Google News cluster about the crisis and the Google Crisis Response page. All of these resources are regularly updated until the crisis abates, when the box will no longer appear with the search results.
According to YouTube spokesperson Jessica Mason, this tool also allows YouTube to tailor important information about crises to certain countries and languages, as well as pointing to crisis response tools that are available, depending on the situation. During Monday's floods, that included Google's Person Finder feature, through which people can search for missing persons or report information.
Storyful helps curate the content in the Crisis Response One Box through its forensic verification process, which supplies YouTube with the necessary information and context for each video.
"In the case of our work with Google Crisis Response, we provide a specific stream of verified user-generated, local news and NGO video from the scene of the crisis," said David Clinch, editorial director of Storyful. He added that there is a particular emphasis on videos that show the scale of the crisis, as well as any specific humanitarian or logistical aid efforts.
"Our verification process allows us to confirm where and when video was shot, and we update our stream to [the Crisis Response One Box] in real time, 24/7, so that it always shows the latest videos from the scene," he said.
Storyful works closely with major NGOs around the world, such as the United Nations Human Rights Council, World Food Programme and the International Committee of the Red Cross, to make sure that their video content from a crisis scene is featured prominently alongside eyewitness videos and those shot by local NGOs.
A Pew Research Center report from last month showed that YouTube is becoming an increasingly viable platform for news, with videos about political upheaval and natural disasters being the most popular over a four-month period.
Do you use YouTube to keep yourself updated on crises? Let us know in the comments.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, hocus-focus.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario