Remember the stodgy old presidential radio address? They were all the rage when President President Franklin D. Roosevelt began his Fireside Chats in spring 1933. A half century later, it was hard to find a radio station that carried them live but they did make a free and easy source of audio for weekend news editors, and so they limped on.
The Office of the President Elect put a novel twist on the 75 year old tradition by posting the addresses on video sharing sites, including YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, MSN. In five short weeks, these weekly addresses have become popularly known as Obama's YouTube Addresses.
Viewership varies widely week-to-week but the numbers are not trivial:
In a country of some 300 million people, the video addresses are well short of a mass medium but they do attract a much more motivated audience than their radio predecessors. The theme of most of the media coverage was that it was a harbinger that the new president would govern the way he campaigned ... all Web 2.0'ish and sticky.
The sticking point for blogger Chris Soghoin was two-fold:
Sohoin's solution is captured in the post's headline -- "Obama should ditch YouTube," presumably in favor of government-owned servers, here-to-for overlooked video sharing start-ups such as Veoh, Vuze, Revver, Blip.tv and his personal favorite, BitTorrent.
The no cost dimension of this video sharing deal reminds us again that public procurement rules are either silent on or, at least, unhelpful on the issue of governments buying things that are free. While an occasional annoyance in the past, the procurement problem around free will not serve us well as government confronts business models that would have been unimaginable at the beginning of the average contract administrator's career.
The privacy implications here are not trivial but there are ongoing conversations between Google and public agencies as more and more governments establish YouTube channels to aggregate and host their videos. Both sides in the dialogue have an interest in positioning YouTube as more than a novelty or plaything, but a platform for doing important things.
Clearly, YouTube and most of the rest of Web 2.0 environment remains wide open for experimentation, pilots and even some production-level work, even with a couple of caution flags fluttering in the distance.
For its part, the federal government has been in negotiations with YouTube for eleven months to get special terms for federal agency use of the service because, as one federal director of web communications noted, "The standard terms contain several points that federal agencies cannot agree to...."
Even as governments, acting together or alone, work toward creating a private label video sharing environment that meets policy requirements, there should be some consideration to the one thing that they cannot re-create: the audience. YouTube aggregates eyeballs. People who like videos go there, and to AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Veoh, Vuze, Revver, Blip.tv and BitTorrent. The great lesson is to go where the eyeballs are, engage people in a community of their choosing, and avoid a false start in a field of dreams of government's making.
The Office of the President Elect put a novel twist on the 75 year old tradition by posting the addresses on video sharing sites, including YouTube, AOL, Yahoo, MSN. In five short weeks, these weekly addresses have become popularly known as Obama's YouTube Addresses.
Viewership varies widely week-to-week but the numbers are not trivial:
- November 15, 2008 -- First weekly address -- 993,086 views
- November 22, 2008 -- Second weekly address -- 525,420 views
- November 29, 2008 -- Third weekly address -- 231,842 views
- December 6, 2008 -- Fourth weekly address -- 454,600 views
- December 13, 2008 -- Fifth weekly address -- 135,783 views
In a country of some 300 million people, the video addresses are well short of a mass medium but they do attract a much more motivated audience than their radio predecessors. The theme of most of the media coverage was that it was a harbinger that the new president would govern the way he campaigned ... all Web 2.0'ish and sticky.
The sticking point for blogger Chris Soghoin was two-fold:
(a) Video Hosting is a "no host give away": the transition team had a mountain of cash ($12 million) but was getting a free ride from YouTube's parent and the company's watermark in the corner of the videos has underdetermined commercial value to Google;
(b) Embedded Videos may violate privacy rules for federal websites: According to Soghoin, just by visiting the Office of the President Elect's change.gov site, "visitors will be transmitting cookies to Google's servers."
Sohoin's solution is captured in the post's headline -- "Obama should ditch YouTube," presumably in favor of government-owned servers, here-to-for overlooked video sharing start-ups such as Veoh, Vuze, Revver, Blip.tv and his personal favorite, BitTorrent.
The no cost dimension of this video sharing deal reminds us again that public procurement rules are either silent on or, at least, unhelpful on the issue of governments buying things that are free. While an occasional annoyance in the past, the procurement problem around free will not serve us well as government confronts business models that would have been unimaginable at the beginning of the average contract administrator's career.
The privacy implications here are not trivial but there are ongoing conversations between Google and public agencies as more and more governments establish YouTube channels to aggregate and host their videos. Both sides in the dialogue have an interest in positioning YouTube as more than a novelty or plaything, but a platform for doing important things.
Clearly, YouTube and most of the rest of Web 2.0 environment remains wide open for experimentation, pilots and even some production-level work, even with a couple of caution flags fluttering in the distance.
For its part, the federal government has been in negotiations with YouTube for eleven months to get special terms for federal agency use of the service because, as one federal director of web communications noted, "The standard terms contain several points that federal agencies cannot agree to...."
Even as governments, acting together or alone, work toward creating a private label video sharing environment that meets policy requirements, there should be some consideration to the one thing that they cannot re-create: the audience. YouTube aggregates eyeballs. People who like videos go there, and to AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Veoh, Vuze, Revver, Blip.tv and BitTorrent. The great lesson is to go where the eyeballs are, engage people in a community of their choosing, and avoid a false start in a field of dreams of government's making.
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