A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman recently said at a news conference:
“Many people have a false impression that the Chinese government fears the Internet. In fact, it is just the opposite.”
The news conference was in response to the Chinese government banned all of YouTube, in response to a single video of Tibetans being beaten. [via Arthur Bright at the Citizen Media Law Project]
Chris Soghoian makes an excellent case against using YouTube as the default for the President-elect’s weekly addresses. There are many issues he touches on including the privacy of the viewers from Google, the free Obama-endorsed publicity for YouTube, the embracing of a closed-format, and so forth.
The question for a 70s era comedy group is not so much “how do we squash all these kids pirating our work”. It’s more along the lines of “how do we remain relevant in the modern media culture”.
There are many that choose to go the route of “sue our fans” so that they buy our DVDs, CDs and nifty merchandise. Thankfully, Monty Python are not one of them. They have launched the Monty Python YouTube Channel. With all the clips from their shows and films already freely available on YouTube, they only had two alternatives.
They could either try to sue every video off the Internet, which is a losing battle against your own fans. Or they could choose to become the first result on every search page any time anyone ever searches for their clips– thereby taking control of the path their fans take on the Internet. If the content is going to be out there anyways, why not put it up yourself, at high quality, stay relevant and make a buck by reminding people of who you were (and selling CDs, DVDs and nifty merchandise). Read the rest of this entry »
First, he was outed as a fanboy. Then he used Flickr on his transition web site. And now he pledges to use YouTube for weekly addresses.
And here I thought our similarities ended with our pan-national childhoods. Former President Roosevelt, who began the fireside chats in the ’30s, was quoted as saying, “What’s a you tube?” More such changes will undoubtedly follow, as the Obama campaign morphs in to the Obama presidency.
In other news, if you want to be part of the Obama team- expect to disclose Facebook and MySpace pages, embarrassing emails/texts and aliases/handles you’ve used online. If they take these things too seriously, no one who has ever been 17 will be hired.
UPDATE: And Chris Soghoian asks Obama to put the videos up in open formats using BitTorrent. Fantastic idea.
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