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Your Interview with President Obama

Steve — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 05:05:00 +0000

Earlier today, for the second year in a row, President Obama sat down with YouTube for his first interview after the State of the Union speech. The President took the opportunity to respond to the protests in Egypt for the first time, to address your concerns on jobs, the debt, and health care, and to answer a series of more personal questions that you submitted in video and text over the past few days on YouTube. The interview took place in the Diplomatic Room in the West Wing, which is the same room where FDR used to deliver his fireside chats.

All told, you submitted almost 140,000 questions to our Google Moderator platform over the past few days, and you cast more than 1.3 million votes on which questions you wanted to have asked. With so many compelling questions, it was a challenge to determine the final list to bring to the White House. Our goal was to cover a wide range of issues that were relevant following the State of the Union speech; to remove duplicate questions; and include video questions wherever possible. With those criteria in mind, we looked at the top 5% of the questions you voted to the top in order to determine which questions to pose to the President. None of the questions were chosen by the White House, or seen by the President before the interview. Here is a playlist of all the video questions that were asked:

We’ll be conducting a similar interview with U.S. Speaker of the House John Boehner in a few weeks - stay tuned for more details. And we’re also expanding this YouTube Interview program globally as part of YouTube World View, a series of interviews in 2011 that will give you even more access and insight into leaders and elected officials from around the world.

Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics, recently watched “Behind the scenes: Before and after the YouTube Interview with President Obama.”

YouTube political commentators join National Economic Advisers in Reuters debate

Steve — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 12:00:00 +0000

On YouTube they go by The Young Turk and How the World Works, but this Tuesday Cenk Uyger and Lee Doran will be taking their political commentary beyond YouTube to a special forum on Reuters.com focused on fixing the global economy.

Reuters Editor-at-Large Chrystia Freeland will host the forum, which will feature a debate between Laura Tyson, former Chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Glenn Hubbard, who held that same position under President George W. Bush. Tyson is a candidate to replace Larry Summers as President Obama’s top economic advisor and also to head the new federal Office of Financial Information.

Afterward, Freeland will host a live video debate between the progressive Uyger and the conservative Doran. This won’t be the first time that Uyger and Doran, who each boast tens of thousands of subscribers on YouTube, have faced off: Each of them has a strong following on YouTube and a regular audience of comentators who take the debate over the future of our country very seriously. Within the context of the Reuters forum between Tyson and Hubbard, their discussion promises to be lively and full of controversy.

The Forum, entitled “Conflicting Visions: Fixing the Global Economy,” will be hosted on Reuters and YouTube. Check out youtube.com/news around midday Tuesday, when we’ll post the clip.

Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, recently watched “Health Care, Economic Policy, and Political Polarization in America”

Your ideas on human rights and free expression on YouTube

Steve — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 12:00:00 +0000

About a month ago, as part of our series of blogs about human rights and video with WITNESS.org, we asked for your thoughts and ideas on some of the key topics on the future of video activism. Now we're responding to some of your top-voted questions and comments within the Moderator series we set up to facilitate the discussion. We've picked out some of the top-rated responses below, and to see the full discussion on privacy, impact, and classification of human rights videos online, click here.

But the conversation only grows from here. This week, we've gathered with around 300 activists, nonprofits, and thought leaders in Budapest for Internet at Liberty 2010, a conference that Google is sponsoring in conjunction with the Central Europeon University to examine key issues in online free expression. We've been collecting your thoughts on how to keep the Internet safe for online free expression in another Moderator series; many of your ideas will be discussed in the panels and discussions that take place in Hungary. The conference will be live streamed, and we'll post videos of the session to a special YouTube channel dedicated to the discussions that take place.

People everywhere use platforms like YouTube to share their stories with the world every day. Sometimes those stories are as simple as an idea, a thought or a diary of life through your eyes; other times, those stories expose abuses of power or human rights violations in ways that are changing how justice is served around the world. Whatever you decide to use the web for, we believe it's vital to a free society to keep the Internet open, and it's through discussions like these that we can continue to teach each other how to do so.

Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics, YouTube, and Sameer Padania for WITNESS

"Human Rights issues are always political and legal issues. If a special status should be given to this kind of content, the servers where this content would be stored must be located in a "safe" location, thus protecting them from governments."
Acetal, Mexico City, Mex

SG: Agreed. Google's servers are protected and have the highest standards of security. Other organizations work to protect servers and use software such as Tor (mentioned by Zoasterboy, above) to keep content safe by relaying it to several different nodes on the network.

SP: It's crucial that important human rights content is kept safe, secure and free from interference or the likelihood of takedown. For that reason, we always advise people we work with to try - where possible - to upload their content to at least a couple of different trusted sites, so that there is always a backup somewhere.

"When uploading a video to YouTube the user should be given the option to blur all faces in the video (as detected by face detection software) and preview the video to verify before making public."
Zoasterboy, Washington State

SG: I like this idea. Not currently on our product roadmap, but it's something we've discussed.
SP: Likewise - great idea, and would help activists enormously. WITNESS and other activists are looking at issues like these at the Open Video Conference in NYC from October 1-3, which includes workshops and a hackday.

"More stories the better - desensitization will wear off and be overpowered by the awareness of the plights of people. Provide background context for people who wish to drill down and communication avenues for people to make leaders aware."
xicubed, Boise, ID

"There should be a system that displays human rights issues that are in need of help built into social networking sites, perhaps through an API, via some sort of dynamic node based distribution system, like Tor."
Zoasterboy, Washington State

SG: Interesting idea - would love to hear more about your thinking. Currently, it's not possible to publicly track where someone uploaded a YouTube video from, unless they choose to geo-tag their video. But protecting distribution pipes to push the video out is smart, and we're big fans of what Tor can do. One of the benefits of YouTube is that your username can be anything you like - so you can keep your identity anonymous. For more information on privacy at Google, click here: http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy.html

SP: It's becoming more important, the more content there is available, to find ways to get important human rights content to the eyes that need to see it - and to get it into new and diverse contexts so that more people can engage with it and act on it. It would be great to make it easy to feed human rights video and its related background information to people using different social networks around the world, without making it intrusive or insensitive, and in a way that maximises security.

"Threats to humans rights are urgency issues and they have different importance to different groups. Government murdering = International. Government inaction = National. Missing child = Regional. Missing pet = Local. Only examples."
Daniel de Souza Telles, Baixo Guandu, Brasil

SG: So true. All politics is local, as they say. And context is so important: in each of these cases, surfacing useful contextual videos around each story gives the audience a broader understanding of the conflict and why it matters to them. On YouTube, we've been looking more deeply into our curator community -- people who are great at discovering good videos, or grouping content into very useful playlists, channels, etc. -- to see if we can better harness this data to serve more robust sets of content in our search results.

SP: What the internet has shown about human rights is that issues in the past that we thought were only relevant to local people actually sometimes resonate with people around the world in surprising ways, and video makes these connections even more powerfully.

"Does YouTube offer any translation support? It seems like one of the main barriers to some videos' uptake would be linguistic, and perhaps in the submission process users could request basic assistance via a third-party partner like WITNESS."
Kirstin, Brooklyn

SG: We do offer some automated translation support... if your video is in English, you can use the auto-captions feature to pull a text caption set for the video, and then use our auto-translate service to translate to other languages. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. As for auto-captions for other languages, we're not there yet -- but hope to be soon.

SP: One other way I think it might be possible to do this is to use Google Sidewiki - you can add information about the page you are viewing, and that could be, in the case of a video, a synopsis or even a transcript in another language. It's becoming more and more important to translate cultural contexts for each other - what someone in Iran takes from a human rights video from Tehran might be very different from what someone in China or Colombia or California would take - so using tools like Sidewiki could help provide more detailed context or explanation in other languages that the uploader might not include themselves.

"Desensitization is inevitable as it increases with the number of views of violence. Also, the number of views a video has will (probably) decrease the likelihood that a person will help (bystander effect). Limit views per user, don't display total."
Zoasterboy, Washington State

"Images, soundbytes, and video clips of disaster and human tragedy cycle repeatedly. Some get repeated to the point that they lose their meaning. Allow viewers to deprioritize such media and replace it with something new, but contextual."
Robert, USA

SG: I agree context matters... the "related videos" section helps users get beyond just the clip itself to contextualize -- but good curators of human rights videos are the best sources of relevant content on particular human rights issues.

SP: This is all about providing context, both when you upload videos, and when you share them - whether that's by forwarding, tweeting, or blogging - and as ever, have an audience in mind. I'm intrigued by the idea of replacing the video with something else contextual rather than being able to filter it out - this could mean being able to drill deeper, into eyewitness footage or interviews, or expert analysis, for example. Also, it's not a magic bullet, but it often helps if the video is linked to some way to take action or help - for example by contacting your representative, signing a petition, or translating the video into a language you speak. And on the violence issue, it's good to bear in mind that not all human rights videos depict violence or disaster directly - the majority of those we encounter at WITNESS are of testimonies about abuses, or campaign demands from activists themselves.

"Already at the upload process: a checkbox labelled "human rights content", and if checked, it will ask the poster e.g. if it could be important to blur faces and gives hints how to do it, or if in general it can be dangerous for others to post this."
Bernie, Berlin

SP: It's a great idea, similar to what Zoasterboy suggests above - and it would be a great asset for activists everywhere to be able to mark their videos as human rights videos, and to be able to protect the identities of those they filmed, not just on YouTube, but on any video platform. The only concern I'd have is that once human rights is an official category, although it might be easier to protect, it might also be easier to block it out.

"Put HRA videos on one channel. Require any URL posting to the channel to sign off on a "terms of use" type-statement that details possible harm that could be caused by posting videos before each posting. Delete HRA videos found outside the channel."
Pagecrafter, Eugene, OR

SP: I think creating a human rights channel is definitely a good idea and would provide much-needed visibility to a lot of human rights issues - but I think you should still be able to find the content in other places and in other ways outside of that channel. Good curation is key. As for the idea of signalling the possibility of harm, it makes a lot of sense to make sure uploaders understand the potential harm they can do by uploading videos into the public domain without getting consent, and protecting identities where necessary, and viewers need to understand the nature of what they're watching and what, if anything, they can do.

"Think mobile under censorship: In countries like mine, Cuba; people can't practically surf the web, but they shared info phone to phone using Bluetooth. So including a downloadable share-ready version for mobile to mobile will be great."
PolO, Corpus Christi, TX

A comment from calabarboy.com on the blog post:

"I think Human Rights Video deserves a special status globally. To think that this is about restoring the dignity of the human person and fight against all forms of oppression. I cannot begin to assume what that status should be, but the technical persons can come up with the appropriate terms. For every human rights footage, to ensure that we don't get desensitized, there must be an ensuing lively discussion that follows and a consequent broadcast on reliable global media, where policy makers can be confronted with the need to take action."

SP: These are great points - discussion and action doesn't just happen online, and finding creative ways of getting videos from online spaces to people who can't access the internet easily is more important than ever - especially in repressive environments. As for the media, now that videos from YouTube and elsewhere are more and more part of mainstream news reporting, media have an important role to play in providing context [DELETED] on human rights footage and pursuing accountability. That said, it would be pretty eye-opening to see policy-makers' responses to important human rights videos directly on YouTube too, as well as on the television.

Six films, six winners, and six different views of democracy

Steve — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 12:00:00 +0000

In perhaps no other time in human history have there been so many different views of what the word democracy means. And that’s what makes our second Democracy Video Challenge so fascinating: over 700 people around the world submitted videos to the contest, answering the prompt “Democracy is...” And last week, the six winners of the contest -- selected by a panel of judges and then voted on by the YouTube community -- were honored at an awards ceremony with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington, D.C.

The six winners came from all over the world: Juan Pablo Patiño is from Colombia, Yared Shumete is from Ethiopia, Anup Poudel is from Nepal, Joel Marsden is from Spain, Farbod Khoshtinat is from Iran, and Adhyatmika is from Indonesia. Click here for some footage from the winners meeting with Secretary Clinton, and here’s a playlist of their winning videos (which are also spotlighted on our homepage today):

What do you think democracy is? Join the discussion in the comments section of these videos.

Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, recently watched “Democracy has a new challenge.”

Live on YouTube tonight: President Obama’s Oval Office address on Iraq

Steve — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 17:18:00 +0000

President Obama set a deadline of August 31, 2010 for ending the combat operation in Iraq and shrinking the U.S. footprint there to no more than 50,000 troops. Tonight, at 8 P.M. ET, the President will address the country from the Oval Office about the status of this effort. You can tune into a live-stream of the speech on YouTube at www.youtube.com/whitehouse -- where you’ll also be able to ask the White House follow-up questions on the future of American involvement in Iraq in a special Moderator series. Click here to submit your question now.

If you miss the live address and the Q & A, tune in to Citizentube afterwards where we’ll feature the President’s remarks, the Q & A, and the Republican response to the Administration’s plan in Iraq.

Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, recently watched Obama to Mark Iraq Handoff in Primetime Speech

What do you think about human rights (and your rights) online?

Steve — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Government police shutting down farmer’s protests in China. A tobacco company employing under-age workers in Kazakhstan. Iranian merchants striking to protest tax increases in Tehran. We've seen stories like these on our computers and phones every day, and we've been documenting many of them on our breaking news feed on Citizentube over the past few months. Videos like these are more than just breaking news images; they're often political statements meant to bring about change.

Earlier this summer we started a blog series with WITNESS, a human rights video advocacy and training organization, examining the role of online video in human rights. So far we’ve talked about why video matters to human rights and how you can protect yourself and the people you film when uploading to YouTube. In this post, we want to raise some key topics about the future of human rights video online, and to hear your thoughts and ideas in a special Moderator series that we've set up on these questions:

How can uploaders balance privacy concerns with the need for wider exposure?

YouTube and other websites give citizens the opportunity to tell stories that would otherwise not get get heard. But what if wider exposure could be harmful to the people you’ve captured on video? At Google and YouTube, we talk a lot about the privacy of your personal data, but what about the privacy of your personal visual identity? There are some exciting technologies that can automatically identify human faces in digital media, but the implications of these technologies need to be considered carefully: if improperly implemented, they could make it even easier for governments and oppressive regimes to identify, track down and arrest activists or protesters (this has happened in Burma and Iran). While we’ve said before that people should consider blurring the faces in human rights videos and getting consent from those they film, inevitably judgment calls need to be made by uploaders who are trying to get footage out quickly to massive audiences to raise awareness. How do you think uploaders can find the right balance?

How can we stay alert to human rights footage without getting de-sensitized to it?

What image first opened your eyes to a human rights issue? In the past, in many countries, human rights images were largely filtered through the news media. But today, nearly everyone has seen a video or photo on the Internet that has made them aware of injustice. With access to these kinds of images getting easier, and more stories appearing from more places, the sheer quantity of this content risks either overwhelming viewers, or desensitizing us to its value. Researchers, educators and legislators are all thinking about how to build media literacy for the virtual age -- and human rights is a growing part of that discussion. How do you think people can stay alert to the power of these images without becoming immune to them?

Does human rights content online require some kind of special status?

As many of the examples in this blog series illustrate, human rights video is unique, and it requires special consideration by viewers, activists, legislators and online platforms. At YouTube, our terms of service carve out special exceptions for videos that have educational, scientific, or documentary value. But in many cases, human rights content is subjective and requires special interpretation -- and now that video can spread far and wide and can easily be reused and remixed beyond its original context (including by human rights abusers themselves), it’s even more important to follow some common guidelines. Every online hosting platform on the web has its own policies for dealing with this content and slowly, a new set of ethics and guidelines is developing in this arena. What do you think those guidelines should look like? And do you think human rights video deserves some kind of special status across the web? Why or why not?

We’d like to hear your thoughts on these questions. Submit your responses or questions to our Moderator series on Citizentube, in video or in text, and we’ll continue the conversation with thoughts on some of your top-voted submissions in a future post.

Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics, YouTube, and Sameer Padania for WITNESS

How would you advance online free expression?

Steve — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 19:00:00 +0000

There seems to be no hotter topic for discussion among Internet watchers these days than concerns over online free expression -- from the role of bloggers in advancing democratic movements, to sophisticated government censorship, to debates over how best to balance transparency with national security concerns. YouTube, Google and the Central European University will make our own contribution to the conversation at a major international conference we’re hosting in Budapest from September 20-22. We've invited grassroots activists, bloggers and vloggers from five continents, as well as representatives from NGOs, academia, industry and government to begin a long-term discussion about these issues and to form international working groups to promote practical change.

But a conversation about online free expression would be nothing without contributions from you. From election protests to government whistleblowing to grassroots advocacy, we’ve seen YouTube users upload, watch and share stories that would’ve never received global attention before the Internet era. That's why we're inviting you to submit your own video that answers this question:

"What's the biggest barrier to free expression on the Internet, and what would you do to overcome it?"

You can go to our Moderator series here to submit ideas and videos and/or to vote on your favorite contributions from others around the world. Please participate by September 7, and we’ll showcase many of your responses at the conference in Budapest later in the month. We’ll also offer highlights from the dialogue on CitizenTube.

Bob Boorstin, Google Public Policy, and Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics, recently watched, Google's commitment to free expression

The YouTube News Feed: What’s happening now?

Steve — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:00:00 +0000

Whether it’s an altercation between a Congressman and a student in Washington, D.C., violent attacks against ethnic minorities in Kyrgyzstan, or oil washing up on a beach in the Gulf Coast, videos uploaded to YouTube by both amateur reporters and professional journalists move through the media ecosystem with a sophistication and speed greater than ever before. But with 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, how can people more easily find the latest breaking news videos on our site? And how can media organizations better leverage this content to expand the scope of their reporting and keep us all better informed?

To develop answers to these questions, we’re testing something new this summer: the YouTube News Feed. We’ll be working with the University of California at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism to track news as it breaks on YouTube. The news feed will provide a stream of breaking news videos on YouTube, with a focus on strong visuals, non-traditional sources and the very latest uploads: videos like this natural gas well explosion in North Texas, this citizen’s election fraud investigation in New Jersey, this activist’s painful run-in with the sharp end of a fisherman’s hook in the Mediterranean sea, or even this run-away elephant in Zurich, Switzerland.

You’ll find the feed on CitizenTube, our news and politics blog at citizentube.com; you can also follow it via our twitter account, @citizentube. While we’ve occasionally tracked news videos on CitizenTube in the past (around the Iran election protests or the Los Angeles wildfires, for example), this summer you’ll see us increasing our focus significantly. Click here to see more.

You can help: if you’ve uploaded breaking news videos, please tweet them to us (@citizentube), and include as much context as you’re able to give. And we’d love to hear your feedback about this project in the comments sections of CitizenTube. Our goal with this news feed is to learn more about the news ecosystem on YouTube -- and who better to teach us than people like you.

Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics, recently watched “Abuse charges at running of the bulls”

Neda Soltan and the power of human rights video

Steve — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 07:01:00 +0000

A year ago this weekend, Tehran erupted in protest at the disputed results of Iran’s tenth presidential election. In the severe government crackdown that followed, documented on cameras and uploaded by citizens to YouTube, no moment has been seen more than the death of Neda Agha Soltan, a young musician whose brutal killing by a sniper became the rallying cry for Iran’s opposition Green Movement. The anonymous videos of her death even won a prestigious George Polk award for journalism last year.

Today on the YouTube homepage, we're featuring a documentary from director Antony Thomas and HBO, entitled "For Neda". The film highlights how citizen reporting has become so important to human rights that even world leaders are paying attention to it. For example, as you’ll see in “For Neda,” President Obama talks about watching the video of Neda’s death, calling it “heartbreaking” and “unjust.”

We’re also taking this opportunity to begin a series of blog posts in partnership with WITNESS, an international human rights organization that supports people using video to document and expose human rights violations, to explore these issues.

How has video become such an important part of human rights advocacy worldwide? At its heart, human rights video is about making something visible that was not visible before. Seeing human rights abuses with our own eyes is very different than reading about the same abuses in a story or a blog post or a Tweet. In the past, we mainly saw these kinds of images in the nightly news or in documentaries -- and even then only occasionally. But now that camera usage and access to the Internet is much more widespread (including in many developing countries), we encounter human rights images much more directly. For example, Burma, Tibet and Iran are places where it’s difficult for local or international media to report, so when mass protests were met with violent force, it falls on ordinary people to try to get images out.

Human rights video is about more than capturing images of abuse as they happen, however. Direct testimony from victims or local activists can provide powerful and compelling evidence of human rights violations. Testimonies like that of "Mary," a Zimbabwean political activist who was abducted, raped and beaten in a secret torture center after the disputed 2008 presidential elections in Zimbabwe, have unique power to help us see what those who have suffered human rights abuses see, to feel what they feel, and to hear what they want to happen.

Videos alone aren’t usually enough; in order to make an impact, activists organize around the content. Sometimes organization is required simply to ensure the content finds an audience: in Iran, it was a networked web of activists who organized proxy servers and emailed footage to a diaspora outside of the country to ensure the videos got around the government's block of YouTube. Other times, coordinated campaigns ensure that citizens are called to action in courts, public squares or parliaments, as has happened in Brazil, Kenya, India or in the International Criminal Court. This isn't a phenomenon confined to developing countries or repressive regimes; it’s also happening in the U.S. Testimony as part of a campaign against elder abuse across the U.S. has helped expose stories that would otherwise go untold, and to pass legislation that improves the lives of millions of citizens. In our next post, we'll talk more specifically about what you can do to make sure videos you've uploaded or care about can have maximum impact for human rights.

As online spaces become more and more important for sharing and accessing information, we believe that access to the Internet itself is becoming a key factor in human rights in the 21st century. To make that a reality, governments, businesses, activists and citizens need to take a collective stand to ensure that video can shine a light into the darkest corners of human society, providing paths to justice to those who need it most. Both at WITNESS and at YouTube we're committed to helping build a global movement for human rights video that does just that.

Steve Grove, Head of News & Politics, YouTube, and Sameer Padania for WITNESS

Defining democracy through art

Steve — Sat, 15 May 2010 13:00:00 +0000

An Egyptian man says it’s like flying freely through the street in your pajamas. A Burundian YouTube user compares it to striking guitar chords to make a beautiful melody. An Indian videographer says it’s like coming together over a cricket game. And a Polish citizen says it’s like a roll of toilet paper. Though their messages are as diverse as the countries they come from, all of these videos are aiming to define something that philosophers have spent centuries debating: what is democracy?

Once again this year, we’re partnering with the State Department and several civic organizations on the Democracy Video Challenge, a global contest that asks people to submit short videos that complete the sentence, “Democracy is...” Starting today, you can vote on your favorite videos from among 18 finalists. The six most popular entrants will fly to the U.S. for a tour of civic and film organizations in Washington, D.C., New York City and Hollywood.

Head over to the Democracy Video Challenge channel page to log your votes now. You can vote once per day until June 15; winners will be announced shortly after. But don’t just vote...leave your comments on the video to let these videographers know what you think of their work. The project is meant to start a discussion. Though there’s no one answer, it’s through dialogue that our understanding of democracy continues to evolve.

Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, recently watched “Learning with Socrates.”

Enabling social sharing with FeedFlare

Steve — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 19:52:00 +0000

Feed content is being constantly distributed via new channels and endpoints every day. More and more, these new channels involve sharing your content in social networks and applications such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz.

Recently, we launched our Socialize service to help you as the publisher distribute your feed via social networks, with the first network being Twitter. If you use Blogger, you can already connect your feed to Buzz via the "connected sites" link in Buzz.

But it's equally important in the social world to make sure your subscribers can also share your feed content easily on these social networks. FeedFlare helps enable this by allowing you to configure links in your feed that promote sharing. You can do this by going to the Optimize tab FeedBurner and choosing FeedFlare, and then of course, adding some flare.

Now, we won't berate you for only doing the "bare minumum," nor do we recommend having "37 pieces of flare" in your feed - but we do think you should express yourself with at least a little flare that helps your subscribers move your content around these social networks a little easier.

To that end, just yesterday we enabled the official "Post to Google Buzz" FeedFlare in our catalog, which easily allows users to repost your content to Google Buzz, and then automatically updates the label with the number of times it was posted.

These links appear as so in your feed (though the exact presentation will vary depending on where your feed is being displayed):

Also included in our official catalog are "Share on Facebook" and others that may be relevant for your audience. If you are an old time FeedBurner user, it may be time to revisit your FeedFlare setup and add some of these new ones.

In addition, if you don't see the FeedFlare you need, you can always develop one using the FeedFlare API which is documented in our FeedFlare Developer Guide.

Posted by Steve Olechowski, FeedBurner Team

Local News on YouTube

Steve — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:25:00 +0000

News is nothing without context, and video is no exception. Helping you discover and watch news videos that are relevant to the stories of the day or to the issues unfolding in your neighborhood is one of our big goals when it comes to YouTube News & Politics. That's why we developed a "News Near You" module on our news page to surface videos from local news partners in your area.

As the New York Times also reported earlier today, "News Near You" surfaces news videos from partners within a 100 mile radius of your computer's IP address. Go to youtube.com/news and check it out: if there are local news videos near you, the module will appear about halfway down the page. If you don't see anything, you can be sure we're working to bring local news partners to you soon. Already we've seen great click-through rates on the videos that are surfacing in this section -- which shouldn't come as a surprise, since these clips are relevant to what's happening in your vicinity.

Beyond reaching local viewers, just having these news clips on YouTube means that they can reach a global audience. For example, a video of a police encounter with a pit bull might intrigue folks far from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where WXII-TV uploaded this video. And a story about a woman giving birth on her bathroom floor is likely to interest more people than just the Nashua, New Hampshire, residents who saw this WMUR-TV clip:

So if you're a local news publisher, we'd love to include you our "News Near You" section. (This post from our partner and advertiser blog will tell you how.) And if you're a citizen who's reporting on the news in your neighborhood, check out the YouTube Reporters' Center to connect with us and share your videos.

Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics, recently watched "Jumping Spiders Courting."