Knight-Mozilla Learning Lab – 256 bytes ought to be enough for everyone

In my previous blog post I already mentioned that participants of the MozNewsLab have to come up with a very short 256 character description of the final project they'll be working on. The deadline for this task is today. In this post I'll be describing the different iterations my LikeLines description went through.
Before I started writing the first version, I decided to draw a mind map of LikeLines so I had an overview of what could go into the 256 characters description. For this I used my Asus EP121 tablet and Microsoft OneNote 2010 (a must have tool if you have a TabletPC):

(click for full version)

Having drawn this map, I decided to just write some short description down and see how well it went:

1) LikeLines unlocks video. It exposes the parts of a video found interesting by the community, allowing for rich video navigation and retrieval at the fragment level. By itself it’s a building block, enabling all kinds of interesting use-cases for news story telling.

This description captures most of the things I want to be captured, but crap, it's 265 characters! A bit too long. But hey, let's rewrite the last line into something shorter:

2) LikeLines unlocks video. It exposes the parts of a video found interesting by the community, allowing for rich video navigation and retrieval at the fragment level. Being a building block, it enables various interesting use-cases for news story telling.

Now it fits: 253 characters. However, I'm not too happy with how it flows. Let's give it another go:

3) LikeLines unlocks video. It exposes the parts of a video found interesting by the community, allowing for rich video navigation and retrieval at the fragment level. Used as a building block, it enables various interesting use-cases for news story telling.

Okay, I'm starting to get happy and it's 255 characters, but it's not perfect yet. I took this third attempt and asked Martha for some input. During the discussion I wrote down some notes for the next attempts (I wrote these notes down in Word 2010, but unfortunately, Word does not support pen and touch input as well as OneNote does).

Iterations 1 to 3 so far were okayish, but they were lacking a few things. For example, it's not clear from the description how LikeLines finds the interesting bits of a video. Furthermore, the description talks about video in general, while it might be more appropiate to put the focus more on videos uploaded by people (in contrast to, e.g., video of tv shows). Addressing these points led to the fourth version of the description:

4) LikeLines unlocks user-sourced video. Interesting bits of a video emerge naturally through community interaction with the video, allowing for video navigation and retrieval at the fragment level. It serves as a building block for rich news story telling.

Hmm, it fits (254 characters) and it's better than the third version, but it doesn't flow well. Wait, the last sentence is important as it describes what it's good for. Let's move it to the front for the fifth and final version:

5) LikeLines unlocks user-sourced video and serves as a building block for rich news story telling. Interesting bits of a video emerge naturally through community interaction with the video, allowing for video navigation and retrieval at the fragment level.

Great! It flows well, states first what it's about and the second part treats how it works. As a bonus, it's still only 254 characters!