Long recordings, such as podcasts, videos and screencasts usually suffer one irritating flaw: you can’t get to the bits you’re interested in without downloading everything up to that point.

If you’re into this otherwise effective means of communication, a company called Veotag promises to save your viewers and listeners a headache by enabling you to mark and label the key moments in your recording. It will also store your recordings for you and play them back to whoever’s interested. You pay, either in a monthly fee, or through allowing advertisements to be displayed. As with so many of these Fremium webware offerings, you have no choice about whose ads appear with your story.

Here’s a (reduced) snap of a screencast which has received the Veotag treatment. You can see from the ad at the top that this is the free version:

The screencast is on the left and the links and segment notes on the right. I’ve just used the single line option, but you can add descriptive paragraphs. If you want to see the above example in action, just click on the picture and you’ll be taken to Veotag.

If you are a Google Video user, you may be interested to learn that you can add an elapsed time to the end of the URL to make it jump to exactly that point. Here’s an example:

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8085568023593858197#1m53

The #1m53 at the end means 1 minute and 53 seconds.

Using the same screencast, you you can achieve a similar effect to Veotag. Please excuse the poor quality video and the slight inaccuracy of the timings. Both could be improved with a little more time:

00:00 Demo start
00:13 Help file introduction
00:24 BrainStorm’s value and ease of use
01:01 Elements of a BrainStorm model
01:53 Working with the outside world
02:20 Keyboard or mouse: your choice
02:35 The toolbars and instant help
03:23 Worked example: planning a wedding
03:35 - entering the Title
04:17 - save and autosave
04:45 - making and editing entries
05:30 - adding details to an entry
06:08 - getting an overview of your work
07:01 - including external information (Magic Paste)
08:19 - rearranging and restructuring your work
10:40 - identical entries (namesakes) are hyperlinked
13:47 Sharing with the outside world
13:51 - web publishing
15:05 - as a text outline
17:14 Wrap

Of course, you could always slide your playback progress slider bar to the desired minutes:seconds as listed above.