thorobasePA

I'm glad to report that the Partymanners' YouTube channel of over 2000 classic horse racing videos has been fully archived.

While we knew Partymanners/Kiris Clown/Jim was attempting to backup his channel on his own, there still lingered the threat of the channel being taken down again before the process was complete.

That led to the "crowd-sourced" effort to share downloading responsibilities, as detailed on the Colin's Ghost blog.

That "crowd sourced" effort took only 3 days to download all 2000 plus videos. It also surfaced what incredible volunteer work was done by a small group of people. Indeed half a dozen fans were responsible for about 90% of the work, and I'd like to give special mentions to Nancy J, Susanne K, Kevin M, Bill K, Diane W, and Reka N - I don't want to give away any identities but please accept this small token of appreciation. Jim was also successful in his back-up plan and so we have a guaranteed, multiple-copy archive of the best racing video archive on the net.

For the moment, the Partymanners YouTube channel is available and working as normal. I do not know what the intentions are of Mr. Mende for the future, but the vitriolic response by the vast majority of the racing community to his course of action speaks volumes in my opinion. I would like to believe it is highly unlikely the Partymanners channel will be taken down again.

I would however remind people that Mr. Mende did put considerable effort in building a collection of many racing videos and made them available to the Partymanners channel. I, like I'm sure everyone else, thank him greatly for that. So let's put this episode under the bridge.

As for the videos themselves, I'd like to confer with Jim first to ensure it is OK but I will most likely put the crowd-sourced archive, once collated, on a file server. For the technical crowd, it will most likely be Amazon S3 with Cloudfront enabled, meaning super-fast download speeds.

Some may ask why would one need the video file if it's being streamed on YouTube. Well, I believe the community should be allowed to show what it can do with the raw data files when they are freely available, in whatever format.

I myself have an idea of for a few new tools that will be released on my new website http://www.thorobase.com in due course.

As an idea to present to the community, consider the following. As part of my job, I build software that is used by large corporations and governments around the world. Often contract stipulations mean that the product must comply with equality laws and must be fully accessible to those with disabilities (e.g. blindness, deafness etc.).

Consider a racing video. Imaging being deaf and not being able to ever know what a race call is actually like. Imaging never knowing what Tom Durkin was saying when Cigar crossed the line for his perfect season in the BC Classic, and how it makes a racing fan tingle every time they watch that video.

Here is my idea. YouTube supports closed-captioning and that can be altered through it's API, in other words, through code. If you are the video owner on YouTube, you can provide text to be used on your video.

With this "crowd-sourced" video archive we can start also "crowd-sourcing" the audio. We could do it manually, or we could employ an on-demand team of global workers (Amazon Mechanical Turk), or through an automated voice recognition service. We could have race calls transcribed so that an entire group of fans could enjoy racing in a way that could never do before. Taking it even further, we could transcribe every single race and analyze it, learning things about what calls are best, and what information race fans are actually looking for with in-race commentary.

This is just one idea I had about these videos; I'm sure you all could think of many more.

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