Comments on: Why Obama should ditch YouTube

President-elect Barack Obama's use of YouTube to deliver his weekly address raises serious issues--due to the privacy-invading cookies that are sent to Google servers.

[vagarob]

bush invaded another country based on lies, clinton lied other oath, nixon lied, johnson and vietnam ... but obama.. obama using youtube? O-M-G GET YOUR PITCHFORKS AND TORCHES -- WE'RE GOING TO WASHINGTON!

p.s. I'm happy that you make more money from CBS/CNET per-word-per-article freelancer deal, but this was just boring and dumb.

[vagarob]

* I really wish news.com would let you edit your own comments. That way, i could fix the million mistakes i made. :D

[snodman]

I watched the video by clicking on the high quality Quicktime version available on the Change.gov website. Looked great and no YouTube involvement at all. By the way, isn't Change.gov being paid for by the Obama campaign and not US taxpayers? The whole transition process is paid for by contributions, not tax dollars, and I believe that Change.gov is part of the transition process.

[csoghoian]

Nope, click on the "$12" million link in my blog post. The transition is paid for with federal tax dollars.

[snodman]

Thanks for pointing out that link. $5.2 million of the $12 million is funded with taxpayer $$, with $6.8 million funded through contributions.

[Olu070]

Sorry, watched mine as a video podcast. No youtube version for me.

[jeffhesser]

i see someone likes to hear themselves talk.... wow that was a long post... i made it about half-way before realizing this was a waste of time. I have to say I really dislike the negative attitude with which the article depicts the YouTube decision. COMPLETELY missing the point as to why this was a 'revolutionary' move. The fact that i can watch these weekly updates from nearly anywhere on my mobile phone or laptop is why this is the right choice. hosting his own video? most phones don't have flash built in which would make visiting change.gov and watching an independently hosted video impossible, and where would these videos INEVITABLY end up? YOUTUBE! not sure if i should be happy or sad that our next President has more tech-sense than the cnet bloggers.....

[srini_83in]

exactly

[ecotopian--2008]

Seems like a non-issue to me. Who cares?

[The_Decider]

Thinking people care about their privacy and companies exploiting it for profit.

People like you is the reason Google can do what it pleases.

[dmm]

He'll have to stop this once he becomes President Obama. It is a violation of federal ethics regulations to give preferential treatment to one commercial entity compared to its competitors.
At the moment, though, I believe he is still operating entirely as a private citizen. That is a weird aspect of American governance. Elect people to a 4-year office (or 2-year or 6-year, for representative or senator, respectively), then wait 2 months before they actually take office. Do other countries do that?

[jeffhesser]

he's not giving the content exclusively to YouTube. It is simultaneously uploaded to multiple sites.

[rcrusoe]

Re: "... wait 2 months before they actually take office". The current date of January 20th was set by the 20th Amendment ratified on 1/23/1933. Prior to that the President didn't take office until March.

The only way, AFAIK, that this could be changed would be another Constitutional amendment which normally takes several years to get ratified.

[OpenGovernment]

There is a difference between free services and things the government buys. The government should be able to use free services of their choice, just like the public. And they should use the ones that make the most sense -- in this case the video site most Americans have already chosen to be. The government shouldn't have to choose all free gifts. Come on!

[AbuLafya]

This is all hysteria. With a simple browser setting anyone can do, no cookies will be sent to YouTube or any site of your choice. Try to do the same with your Credit Card purchases (YES: you complaining about the wrong industry).
The government *should not* enter the online video delivery business the same way it does not enter TV broadcast or radio. I see nothing wrong in posting it online. If they should post at few leading sites, there would be nothing anyone can argue.

[gsmiller88]

I'm against Obama using YouTube because it skews the most watched rankings. Obviously, being the next president of the United States, every video he makes will get millions of views.

[hutwarmer]

does it get warmer under a tin foil hat compared to a normal hat?

[jerrymerfeld]

Good question... I wouldn't know, I never leave w/o my tin foil hat.

[envirogovy]

All valid points. However, I think the mission at hand outweighs the theoretical privacy risk or appearance of preference incurred by using Obama's use of YouTube.

The reality is that government should 'fish where the fish are'. And, at the moment, the fish are at YouTube. While many may have watched the videos from change.gov, or from an email, many also probably came from another YouTube video, because duh...YouTube is really popular.

Should government waste tax dollars keeping up its own flash-ready servers with the advancements that are made by YouTube and other 3rd party video sharing tools? Should government build a second life-like platform to conduct virtual meetings? A google earth like platform for its spatial data?

Yes, a fair solution is provide an agnostic approach that distributes the video to any company the registers to receive and host them.

However, given that YouTube has more users than other sites, I would opt for a pragmatic and simple approach, and have government use on its own sites what wee use in real life. By the people, for the people.

The people have spoken, and they have chosen YouTube (at least for now, they have).

[purpleLightning]

Ugh, CNET has done more handwringing over Obama posting video to Youtube than I've seen anywhere else. Amidst all the text typed out about it, I've yet to see anyone raise a legitimate repercussion we can expect from this in terms of violation of our privacy. All I see are vague scare tactics.

[The_Decider]

Duh!

Google is a company whose entire business model depends on collecting as much info as possible.

It is not paranoia, it is fact.

Everything Google releases is spyware.

[someguy999]

Its just interesting that a presidential address is being hosted on a platform which is owned by a company which (more or less) is 100% driven by ad revenue. It doesn't exactly give me the highest level of confidence that we won't sooner or later have it book ended by a commercial.

There's already and advertisment for Chrome browser at the bottom of the page...

If they're going to use it for government purposes they should have NO advertising in any way shape or form.

[docthink]

Why are people so wrapped up? It's not like you watch the state of the union address on NBC or CNBC or CNN or CBS and not get commercials before or after. It's not like they don't include a network bug on the page. What is more important, getting the message to the people where they are? or crazy rules that separate government information from the people?

What's the choice?

[webmatic]

I totally agree with with above comment that Gov. should not enter video sharing business and use existing popular sites. Instead of suggesting better ways to do this article take -ve tone.

[rnaoncfixd]

The reason this bothers me is because this is very much like Sarah Palin using a yahoo mail account to address fellow governing parties.

To me, as a video professional, this represents a sort of low class way to get your message across.

You would think that they would create an all access website where people could watch the videos at their own bandwith, with possibly HD quality, streaming maybe, and so forth. The entire backlog could be safely kept in order.

Suppose someone hacks into the account? Suppose someone posts something detrimental using that stolen account information?

Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea of that Obama is trying to reach out to as many people and update us on what is happening, I just think that using You Tube is a lazy way to go about it.

[mrgoodall]

An earlier poster made the comment, " fish where the fish are." He knows his base and where they are, they are on youtube. he has posted major policy announcements during the campaign as well as his speech on race and it generated more hits than anyone imagine. What youre recommending is akin to being an indie musician and not advertising to people who listen to indie music, like indie music stores, itunes, the like.

[renopanther]

I have to agree with several posters - this was a ridiculous waste of words. argument for the sake of argument, ignoring the main point to make a cheap shot statement. The agenda is to get the video - easily accessible in several formats - to as many people as possible. Use Bittorrent? Do you realize how few casual web users even know what that means? Everyone who first heard of Youtube from change.gov can get a nickel from me.
Govt. owned servers? That's just not wise. Log-on with your SSN? Or the biggest hacker target ever. Then who get's to post on this govt owned server - 'official' govt business only? campaigns? Eventually the press and govt become mingled. Que the Chinese national anthem.
Then as though the 10 trillion dollar deficit is not enough, you want MORE ways to spend govt. money?

Any site that wants to host the videos - including direct download from change.gov is the best way. The govt is not the press. Or the web.

[Earl Benzar]

What a useless article. I seriously doubt Google needs any advertising. Everyone knows Google. Maybe Obama utilized YouTube because it has the largest audience (by a wide margin). As for cookies, who cares? Clear your cookies if you're that paranoid.

BTW, here are the video site popularity stats:

http://www.BeateNetworks.com/blog/index.php?/archives/505-eMarkter-Google-Dominates-Online-Video.html


As you can see, other video sites are miniscule compared to the rest. I say good on Obama for reaching out to the largest possible audience.

Sincerely,
Earl Benzar
Nashville, TN

[OpenGovernment]

Amen Earl Benzar!

[toosday]

I don't know if taxpayers, especially those who aren't tech-savvy - would like to pay for bandwidth. As you know, that's what happens to sites that are .gov: It's paid for by us. I can imagine the media going crazy if Obama starts adding additional costs to taxpayers before he even gets in office.

[M C]

CNet CNet CNet...reduced to click-bait-chasing at the expense of intelligent comment, or may I add, real news.

Non-issue here, really. I mean, um, Google big and bad. Cookies bad. Smash cookies.