Details of how Joost, the talked-about online video startup, may change the way we watch TV have been slim, but NewTeeVee says it has everything to do with what Joost does with metadata - a layer of programming data that describes content. For Joost, metadata could be anything form a simple timeline or tags, to a full-grown programming guide.

Use of metadata on Joost would pave the way for timestamped comments and tags embedded in video content - a la VH1's Pop-Up Video and social features like allowing users to create their own networks based on what they're chatting about.

Joost hired Dan Brickley, who is one of the inventors of FOAF – an RDF-based metadata framework that makes it possible to transform simple web pages into machine-readable social networking nodes.