Government on YouTube

Higher Education by day, MLIS student by night

Government on YouTube

January 18, 2009 – 10:37 pm | by lindybr1

The government is on YouTube. Check out their welcome message, starring Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p83pNZdmhQ]

I’ve had a chance to peruse through the Senate and House YouTube sites and really like what I see. You can click on a state and a bubble pops up with the Senator or Congressperson’s name. Click on the name and you can see their channel. Of course I checked out Oregon Senator Ron Wyden’s page (or “channel”) and was able to read all about him, learn about his interests, constituents, etc and watch plenty of videos. I think this is a pretty cool way to learn about our government officials rather than soley reading about them.

It looks like a few officials don’t have channels or sites uploaded yet. (Curiously, I checked for the state of Illinios to see if Roland Burris had a channel yet but I realize he was only sworn in last week so I’m probably getting ahead of myself. I notice new Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley doesn’t have a site yet either… it’s probably too early).

Tags: government, house, LIS5661, senate, video, youtube

Put Your Related Post Plugin Code Here :)

http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com/ theunquietlibrary

Great post—thank you for the links! Have you seen Tweet Congress yet? I also found USAgov on Twitter this morning while working on another project: http://twitter.com/USAgov

You may be interested in this, too—I discovered my state government, Georgia, is building a web 2.0 presence (see http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com/2008/12/18/georgia-government-20/ ). Now if our reps will get on Twitter and YouTube!

Thank you again for sharing this information!
http://lindyjb.wordpress.com lindyjb

I checked out your posting on Georgia’s state government building a web 2.0 presence. Very cool! (I also added a comment to the post basically saying what a great educational tool — getting students within Georgia to learn more about their state government via different means than reading about it or hearing a lecture on the subject… Students might be more interested to learn about what the state gov is doing via Facebook, Flickr or Twitter than other old-fashioned traditional means.)

I wonder if other state governments are taking advantage of using social media/web 2.0. It would be interesting to find out!

Circulation