"Footnote dots?" "Points of distraction?" "Embedded text?"

June 30, 2012 9:32 AM

Let's say you're on Youtube, and you're watching a video, and on the progress bar there are little dots where, if you click on them, you get extra text or links or pictures pertinent to the video, ads, etc. What are those things called?

This is a translation question about an article describing the same feature on a Chinese video website. The term in Chinese is "视频节点技术", which directly translates to "video node technology". I'm also sure I'm not mistaking this for anything else, because I'm looking at pictures of it.

Anybody know this one? I've been trying every search string I can think of, and it's getting me nowhere!

posted by saysthis to computers & internet (5 answers total)

If it's something put there to explain what's going on in the video, especially put there by the creator of the video, then I've called it an annotation. If it's just some comment that happens to be in the video like that I've just called it a comment.
posted by theichibun at 9:45 AM on June 30, 2012

Annotation! I like that.

I think I'll go with "progress bar annotation feature". I still have a ways to go, so if anyone has any better suggestions, get 'em in!
posted by saysthis at 10:29 AM on June 30, 2012

The youtube nomenclature calls them simply annotations, without any modifiers.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:29 AM on June 30, 2012

Rhomboid, thanks. I've deleted unnecessary modifiers.
posted by saysthis at 11:45 AM on June 30, 2012

The little speech bubble icon turns them on and off. If you hover over it, you'll see "Show Annotations."
posted by rhizome at 11:54 AM on June 30, 2012