President-elect Barack Obama recorded his first weekly address today, laying out policy objectives and restating some of the problems the country faces today.  The weekly address has been a staple of Presidential communications for decades.  

As many predicted, however, he made history again when he posted it not just on the radio and not on TV, but YouTube.  Cross-posting it to several other video services, as well on the radio, he’s reaching Americans wherever they may be.  

Republican nominee for Vice President Sarah Palin has been taking a beating from her interviews with Katie Couric on CBS.  The clips on foreign policy, newspapers, supreme court cases and domestic issues have become viral hits this week, all of them exposing the less-than-prepared side of Palin.

Well, it appears the campaign has gotten smart and started advertising on YouTube, no doubt looking for keywords matching Palin and CBS, ensuring that their ads will appear next to the damning videos.  Good thinking, but it offers an interesting juxtaposition.

When creating advocacy videos for YouTube or other electronic media, the general rule is to make it shorter than 5 minutes. Even better is 3 minutes. Then, why is Barack Obama’s campaign churning out 20 minute videos? Because people are watching them.

Link to video

It’s about time someone found a better way to display documents online. Several companies have tried it, but Scribd gets it right this time around. Previously, websites linked to PDFs, Word documents and other files that one would have to wait and download, find the file on their computer and open it up in their slow word processor or take a coffee break while Acrobat fires up.

Scribd uses Flash technology to stream the document straight into a website, embedded right in with the rest of the content. You can share documents with embed code just like YouTube, email it to a friend, zoom in, flip through pages and see all the pages at once.

It has great potential for government websites and research organizations that have thousands of files and manuals that visitors must download and labor through. Using the Scribd Platform, they can even convert the entire collection of documents at once and share them instantly. Free from the chains of outdated and clunky government websites, these documents are searchable and placed in context with similar documents…all automatically. If only agencies would move quickly enough and adopt the new method.

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