Houstonian Christine Tremoulet is shining a spotlight on local businesses through her passion for photography. She's capturing the movers and shakers around town—from the crave-worthy Dessert Gallery to the hands-on helpers of Houston Habitat for Humanity. Christine's project is a stroke of a larger movement, "We #SLGT," which encapsulates a community-centric message and call to action: Support Local, Grow Together. We love what Christine is doing with the SLGT Photo Project, a very cool way of showcasing the entrepreneurial spirit that lives in Houston.

Pictured below: The SnapStream Team, 50-channel TV Search Engine, Rakesh Agrawal (CEO) and Legos spelling SnapStream.

Congratulations to our decorated clip-show customer, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, who just picked up their eighth straight Emmy for Best Variety, Music or Comedy Series. It's no wonder that Jon Stewart and his team have held on to such a supreme winning streak; they churn out 168 fresh episodes per year at a rigorous pace. That's four tapings weekly, 42 weeks out of the year.

As The Daily Show unit floated to the stage on cloud nine, the Emmy commentator prodded, "I am not sure that the Academy would be so quick to award The Daily Show these things if they knew what we used the Emmys for around the office. Executive Producer Rory Albanese will accept for the program because Jon Stewart is too busy resting in his bed of melted Emmys."

Who knows why Jon Stewart really wasn't present, but Albanese was certainly in high spirits as he acknowledged the caliber of the fellow nominees.

“This is crazy. Stephen Colbert went to Iraq. Conan. This category is insane,” Albanese exclaimed in disbelief.

Insane, indeed. We are so darn proud of The Daily Show for their continued success and back-to-back critical acclaim. And we have to give them props for having in-house TV search technology and a massive digital archive. Here @SnapStream, we always enjoy the hysterical programming that ensues.

"We keep winning it," Albanese rejoiced in television glory. "It’s tough to feel bad. We work really hard."

Yes, we know you do! Eight cheers to you all at The Daily Show! Keep up the excellent work!

Here is the full video of Jon Stewart's Glenn Beck impression shown in the nomination reel:

Rounding up a week in the news with our data collected at TV Trends, here's a cool word cloud that visually displays the nation's pulse. The words are proportionally sized to higher frequency of mention in the closed captioning data, showing the hottest and most prominent issues saturating the headlines. You see, Iraq, Brigade, Combat... Serious stuff.

It's also fun to compare how news travels differently between TV and the Internet. To track the buzz of online news, check out Google Trends and see for yourself. Which one do you think leads in breaking news first? TV or the Internet? Was it the chicken or the egg?

Hey SnapStream Fans,

Since we're always tracking the hottest topics on television, we thought we'd whip up a visual word cloud to represent the sizzling trends of the summer. Taking transcript excerpts from peaking keywords on TV Trends from May to present, we made this beautiful conglomerate of headlining news and pop culture.

Just one of the many cool things you can do with the rich information stored in TV Trends--you know it's open and free for anyone to use, right?

See the original graph that shows the scope of television media coverage.

Last Thursday, I tagged along with Rakesh Agrawal (CEO of SnapStream) to introduce TV search to the regional PIO Network meeting held at the Texas Department of Transportation. I'll tell you, public information is A LOT to keep up with, especially with all the mutations of social media multiplying every second.

There were all sorts of PIOs represented, from city offices to the Coast Guard. It was cool to see all of these diverse officials gathered with their common, collective concern for public knowledge, safety and health.

The meeting kicked off with Chuck Wolf, an integral media consultant in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill response, which is now transitioning to the gulf restoration response. (Woohoo the well is capped!) At the Joint Information Center headquartered in New Orleans, Chuck and his team dispense a mind-boggling amount of documents--fact sheets, press releases, media advisories--on a 24-7 basis.

“A Joint Information Center is a co-located group of representatives from local, state, federal and private organizations designated to handle public information needs during an incident or event.”

BP has put together quite the team to handle the world's largest oil spill response. You can see who's involved at this page of deepwaterinvestigation.com.

Having a tough act to follow, we were the closers in the presenting line-up. (In baseball, that's a very important job!) Rakesh led the presentation about SnapStream, joined by the insights of Rosie Torres, Assistant PIO, Harris County Office of Emergency Management and Dinah Massie, PIO, Houston TranStar.

At the Harris County OEM, the PIOs recently monitored flash flood warnings during Hurricane Alex. Meanwhile, the Houston TranStar office continually tracks local television news to verify and enforce correct attribution for traffic footage. Those magic words, "courtesy of Houston TranStar" must appear. (Or else, major traffic jams will incur!)

Lastly, we learned the telling results of a media monitoring survey conducted among the Houston-Galveston group. Two major stats to highlight:

That's what makes SnapStream incredibly relevant for this group. Since many of these municipal agencies share LAN connections, they can pool together and utilize one centralized SnapStream Server to access TV Search and disperse actionable news quickly to their departments. Wouldn't that be something?

In case you missed the vital information contained in this webinar, watch the House of Representatives webinar on SnapStream's YouTube channel.
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With midterm elections* around the corner, and all 435 of the House seats up for grabs, the news media will continue to play a critical role in shaping public opinion. As candidates are preparing to hit the ground running on their campaign trails, we're hosting a webinar this Thursday, July 22 to address the political advantage of TV search for tracking issues, competition and appearances.

The reality is, between now and November 2, candidates who practice proactive media relations (as opposed to reactive) will have increasingly better odds at sweeping victory over their districts.

To control messaging and earn the public's confidence, parties with take-charge leadership will capitalize on the media as a direct channel to reach their constituents. The public relations route leads to organic credibility that complements the value of sponsored ads.

Now, this might sound like a no-brainer for political strategy, but you'd be surprised to learn how many people aren't maximizing on this in a smart way. Paying for a clipping service or subjecting interns to full-time TiVo duty--probably not doing your cause much justice.

Alternatively, we've seen this formula work for our TV-hungry customers across city, state and federal government:

1) Dedicate a SnapStream Server to a trusty staff
2) Instantly search, clip and record TV
3) Launch game-changing campaign tactics

Sign up for our webinar to learn how to:
• Search by keyword across news networks
• Pinpoint mentions in seconds
• Create clips and download transcripts
• Receive real-time TV alerts
• Gain competitive intelligence
• Verify advertising
• Monitor public appearances
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*Also up for election: 36 United States Senate seats and 37 out of the 50 United States Governors seats.

What I love about working at SnapStream is getting to see what people DO with our software. Here, Daniel Freed shows us a bona fide example of user-generated content. You have to watch the introductory video (below) that he recently put together using SnapStream.

For the past few years, Daniel Freed has been honing his skills at harnessing SnapStream for comedic purposes while working at Current TV's clip show, infoMania. As the show's supervising producer, he figured out how to integrate the technology into the clip show's workflow.

The tagline for infoMania says it all: "Chewing up the week's media so we can regurgitate it, half-digested, into your mouth." Mmm, Yummy. But before the pundits can chew out the media, they have to first find the hot trending topics.

During that process, TV Search technology becomes a rich source of inspiration. It's like giving squishy Play-Doh to a young child and saying "make something."

In the hands of talented writers, and producers like Daniel, the editable, linkable and clippable substance (of television) can be played with and molded.

But to these creatives' credit, you won't find imagination for sale on our products page.

Currently, Daniel is looking for work on other shows, and he says if SnapStream is involved (or even potentially), he would love to continue creating fresh content with this technology. For a knee-slapping good chuckle, check out some more of Daniel's work, on his page and on Hulu.

Keeping our good word and following up from this previous post, we're giving you the replay of our J-School webinar featuring Content Supervisor Paul Hitlin at the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Paul Hitlin joined us on 5/26 before a virtual group of university educators, all eager to learn about fresh methods of conducting research, as well as sources for funneling data-rich content into their institutions of higher learning.

Catch a glimpse into PEJ below. The clip illustrates how they've incorporated SnapStream into their quantitative research process, which is quite systematic. Visit our YouTube channel to view the remaining chapters of the webinar, including further insight from Paul on how they used to do things pre-SnapStream.

Top 10 things you didn't know about PEJ:

10. Under the umbrella (not Rihanna's)
It's one of seven projects under the umbrella of the Pew Research Center

9. Defined by what they're NON
"NON partisan, NON ideological & NON political"

8. They're not a think tank, but
A "fact tank," navigating the information revolution

7. You'll never guess their claim to fame
The largest human coding news organization in the U. S. of A

6. Get this, they even have human bots
Well, kind of. 15 full-time coders that scour 52 media outlets daily

5. On a mission that's possible
To evaluate and study the performance of the press (via content analysis)

4. Historically speaking
It started 9 years ago in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

3. Serious news flash and power
News coding research began in mid-2006, with DVD burners and manpower

2. GRANTED for curricular support
Stony Brook University gave PEJ a grant to fund the SnapStream Server

1. Searching TV is a snap!
The team upgraded to SnapStream in January 2010

Anaheim is the home of Disney Land, nestled in California's vibrant metropolis of Orange County. With over 3 million people residing in the O.C. and the constant influx of tourists, the Anaheim Police Department works diligently to keep citizens safe, informed and protected.

Sergeant Rick Martinez and Sergeant Tim Schmidt, the primary PIOs at Anaheim PD, have deeply integrated and ingrained SnapStream into their everyday line of duty. From talking with Sgt. Martinez and Sgt. Schmidt during our PIO webinar on June 3, we learned about their applications of the SnapStream Server. And to our delight, we discovered there's much more than meets the eye.

At the core, Anaheim relies on SnapStream chiefly to search across TV and to create clips for archival references. But interestingly enough, the police department is also capturing video evidence from news broadcasts and deploying it to support criminal investigations. You wouldn't believe the number of witnesses who divulge information to the news media, when instead they should be reporting valuable tips to the police department.

“ We're now gathering evidence that we were not necessarily getting before. We're more efficient because of that [TV search]. ”
- Sgt. Tim Schmidt, PIO, Anaheim PD

In any case, Anaheim PD can now masterfully rope in testimonies, some with dead-on implicating statements, from television news sources, and in turn, utilize these broadcasts in court. Sgt. Schmidt says that the inherent value of a news clip has extremely powerful conviction playing before a jury.

So now, we are helping police departments do more than monitor media because:

• They know about evidence that otherwise, they wouldn't be aware of, if it weren't for the channeled pulse of TV search.
• They can avoid issuing subpoenas to new stations, which slows down the progress of a case while it's hot. (And forget about paying for clipping services.)

Catch this snippet of insight from Anaheim. For the whole story, the full-length Anaheim webinar is available on our YouTube channel.

Publishing widely regarded content analysis, the Project for Excellence in Journalism serves an important role: keeping the industry in check.

A non-profit, non-partisan organization under the umbrella of Pew's Research Center, PEJ is a vital resource for journalists and citizens dedicated to the study and reflection of the press.

With teams of analysts watching and dissecting broadcast news on a daily basis, the Project makes great use of the SnapStream Server to capture traditional television and stream recordings right from their desktops, all in the name of empirical research.

Speaking to the Project's Content Supervisor, Paul Hitlin, I gathered that this type of technology has made their workflow become much smoother; they were able to eliminate the hassle of burning DVDs and bringing them to their work stations, not to mention keeping them organized!

What they find useful about going digital: they can directly play back content and archive it. This makes it easy to handle simultaneous things--like side-by-side comparisons of news outlets and writing up research findings--all in one place, from the PC.

Paul Hitlin has graciously agreed to share his insights from the front lines, covering the bases of broadcast news analysis. On the horizon, he sees vast potential for the PEJ to expand the scope of quantitative trends they can isolate in the media from the source of TV search technology.

For professors and professionals in journalism and communications, there's so much you can learn from Paul and what PEJ is doing. I hope you'll join us next Wednesday, May 26 for a live webinar and interactive question and answer session.