Political drama hits YouTube.com

Three million viewers have now seen a video on YouTube.com that compares Hillary Clinton to Big Brother in George Orwell's famous novel, "1984." I think the point of the video, and you can see the author on another video, is that the strings of sound-bites that Hillary is famous for smacks of the placebo drug in the book.

"Ratz" work at these federal fisheries management council meetings would be good fodder for YouTube. You need a sound collector from a bird-watching store to get a good sound track though.

Then you get a video posted on Hillary's behalf, presumably, then a video posted by Newt Gingrich. Newt is saying that the "Vote Different" video by ParkRidge47 doesn't contribute anything to the public discourse. Well, Newt is always right, if you ask him that is, but he makes some real good points. And ParkRidge47 didn't have to put Obama's name at the end of the video: that didn't add anything to the message, it just got everyone in a dither.

The point is that 50 million people a day log onto YouTube to check out the latest cool videos, and climbing fast. I've gotten to sending hyperlinks to some to my kids. It works best that way. There's one about a guy in Wisconsin who is building a replica of Stonehenge all by himself. It's all right there to see, he's doing it. So much for aliens coming to Earth and putting those huge stones in a field in England.

Another video is an advertisement for one good blender. The guy puts a couple of golf balls in the blender and reduces them to a pulp. Then he puts 50 marbles in and turns them into glass powder. Another video had a guy pulling dents in cars with a chunk of dry ice. It's from a company that repairs dents by various simple means without body putty and paint. You can learn a lot in a hurry on YouTube. 65,000-new-videos-posted-there-every-day worth of education.

When I tell some people that I Blog, they look at me like a raccoon in the headlights. Man, I have a feeling if you don't get hip to stuff like blogging and YouTube, you'll be the raccoon under the headlights. Business Week magazine predicted that blogging was going to be more influential than the Gutenberg Press. I think that YouTube is going to be much more influential than blogging.

On a side-note to that, Internet researchers/page viewers are looking for candidness and impartiality, unbiased and not-bought-and-paid-for information. When newspapers put their reporters on blogs on their web-site, I'm not sure if that is going to help them. From what I see, the modern web surfer likes to read someone who makes $110 every year and a half from Google ads. As soon as you get a good paying job, you're outta there as a top source of information.

You can search YouTube for any subject. Police thought a video made of their beating Rodney King was just a stroke of real bad luck. Now you can search YouTube for "police brutality" and get 735 videos of police brutality from around the world. Anyone in public office needs to now just visualize whatever he or she is saying ending up on YouTube in the next minute, via someone's cell phone camera.

Someone else thinks the Internet is going to change the face of politics in this country too. Some folks set up this site so you can become an Internet Delegate and "nominate" someone for the Presidential primary coming up next year. Ya gotta read it for yourself. The Washington Post, and others, speak of it like it was the next best thing to peanut butter. Considering the following example, a good bi-partisan team might have a good shot at it.

How do you think Katherine McFee got defeated last year on American Idol, or that Sanjay guy is hanging in there this year? There is a counter-American Idol movement going on in cyberspace. The tenet is that A.I. is America's biggest karaoke contest. If you ask me, Howard Stern is ruining the fun of tens of millions of people who are just looking for a little clean fun out of life. But he wouldn't know anything about that. A lot of folks that post to YouTube wouldn't either, so be careful when you go there.