One of the goals of the Continuous Media Web project1 is to integrate digital media with the World Wide Web: media documents can hyperlink to and from other documents in the same way that HTML pages do. The dual capabilities of hyperlinking (1) to other documents while viewing a media clip, and (2) into precise time intervals in a media clip, enable greatly improved user interaction with media. We discuss the idea of a novel media browser application, which merges the concept of a traditional media player that presents video and audio to the user, with a Web browser that provides hyperlinking and navigation between networked (media) documents. The particular issue we address in this article concerns the primary navigational features: a media player relies on a playlist while a Web browser uses a browsing history for navigation. We discuss design and user interface issues that arise when integrating these two navigational features in a media browser.

This demonstration introduces the Annodex set of technologies, which enable the creation of Webs of audio and video resources integrated into the searching and surfing infrastructure of the World Wide Web. The demonstration covers the live creation of Annodex content and thus of Webs of video and audio, the setup of a Web server to distribute Annodex resources, the use of a Web browser to hyperlink between clips of Annodex resources, and the use of a Web search engine in which media clips can be searched through text queries.