EGYPT: YouTube and partners sift, sort Egypt footage

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YouTube has asked Storyful, a real-time curation company based at the National College of Ireland in Dublin, Ireland, to help make it easier for users to find the most meaningful videos of the uprising in Egypt by assembling daily playlists, which they post alongside Twitter feeds and blogs.

The 1-year-old startup uses a proprietary search tool to cull news content from social networks. Storyful staff, including Editorial Director David Clinch -- formerly of CNN International -- review and sift the results.

On Saturday morning, the site featured a discussion of whether Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had resigned his party role alongside screen shots of Al Arabiya network and contradictory Tweets. Storyful is also helping to fill a new channel YouTube launched in June with help from students at UC Berkeley: CitizenTube.

For the new channel, YouTube staff worked with students at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to track breaking news through uploaded video. That effort continued during this week’s protests in Egypt.

‘Our team is identifying relevant videos primarily via keywords in multiple languages related to the protest (i.e. Egypt, or using the January 25 tag, or they say protest in Arabic),’ a YouTube spokesperson said in an email to Mashable.

YouTube has taken on a similar curative role during other crises like the earthquake in Haiti and the unrest in Iran.

-- Molly Hennessy-Fiske