Google just let video sitemaps out of the bag:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/introducing-video-sitemaps.html

Hmm. Wouldn't it be better to include such stuff right into (X)HTML? E.g. <a href="link to video player swf" rel="video_player">...</a>

Yeah this but this could help make sites in Flash more search friendly especially in some cases where site architecture is a real issue.

Interesting how Google turned into a kind of W3C, releasing standards for web developers :)

True but standards can't help but make content more accessible for engines too and especially when it comes to images.

<< Interesting how Google turned into a kind of W3C, releasing standards for web developers :) >>

At least Google gets it done. I read at the WHATWG wiki today that the HTML5 spec won't be finished until 2022. (Or something like that; several years are mentioned, all of them well beyond the near-future.) I'm sure it's meant as tongue-in-cheek. Ha ha. (I actually *am* pretty understanding of the magnitude of work involved.)

But WRT Google defining standards, isn't this what the dominant player in any field is expected to do? Google raises the bar, everyone else improves their game. (Or, when MS is dominant, they just move the bar and don't tell you in the hopes you'll stop playing the game.)

What are Google's motives in this move? Obviously they want to index as much content as possible. But Video Sitemaps will make it easier for all search engines to discover content, so Google must have some damned fancy video/audio search capabilities ready to drop in the near future.

Yes Bill I think you are right!

This framework seems similar to the xml behind audio/video podcasts, like that used by iTunes. By providing a brief text "transcript" of audio/video contents, searching "video talks" would be much easier. When you add video sitemaps to Google's voice recognition initiatives there is a lot of potential.