Watching Video Change Our World

[Cross-posted from the Google Blog]



As you might have noticed, there's a lot of fascinating stuff that happens on YouTube every day. For example, did you know that a nine-year-old recently used YouTube to successfully campaign to save his local kickball lot? Have you seen the video of a Guatemalan lawyer who predicted his own assassination on YouTube moments before it happened? Or did you know that YouTube and Google have launched a new technology platform for political debates, which allows you to submit and vote on the most important issues you want to discuss with political candidates?



These are the sorts of things you can stay on top of with Citizentube, a special YouTube blog devoted to chronicling the way that people are using video to change the world. If you've followed news and politics on YouTube, you might have noticed that we started Citizentube as a video channel on the site a few years back, but we soon realized that keeping track of all the phenomenal uses of YouTube by posting our own videos just wasn't fast enough — so now we're blogging, too. We generally focus on two types of posts: the compelling political and social uses of YouTube that we see the community bubble up every day, and our own programming initiatives and partnerships in the political, news, and nonprofit arenas.



Our team creates opportunities for you to engage with content that goes beyond the humorous or even the educational — content that changes the way you interact with your communities, institutions, and leaders. The first initiative we launched in this space was the You Choose '08 platform and the CNN/YouTube Debates in 2007. Since then we've expanded our programming to the fields of government, activism, and news & information. On the blog, we'll post an occasional series that gives a bigger picture perspective of what's happening in the worlds of news reporting, government, and social change on YouTube.



So be sure to check out www.citizentube.com and subscribe to our RSS feed (we're on Twitter, too: @citizentube). With more than 20 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, our blog helps provide you with a filter that you can use to see the way that video is changing our world.



Yours,

Steve Grove

YouTube News & Politics

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Over 500 Ways to Reform Health Care

Last week, YouTube Senator of the Week Chris Dodd (D-CT) asked you for your input on the health care legislation that Congress is currently drafting. You responded enthusiastically on the Senate Hub, contributing over 500 unique ideas on health care reform and casting over 26,000 votes on these ideas, making this the most successful round of Senator of the Week to date. Today, Senator Dodd responds to your top-rated suggestions:







While Senator Dodd wasn't able to respond to all of your suggestions, there were many compelling and thoughtful responses to the health care reform question submitted through Google Moderator. Many of you endorsed a single payer system, with one Massachusetts resident offering this rationale: "SINGLE PAYER. Everybody in and nobody out. It's a great idea from the left, which is public financing, combined with a great idea from the right, which is private delivery."



Others disagreed, like Porter from Florida, who wrote, "We are pleased with our health care sharing program and a mandated health insurance will be an infringement on our religious and economic liberties. Share programs are an effective and efficient part of our nation's current health care system."



While Senator Dodd is no longer accepting suggestions through the Senate Hub, we encourage you to continue this spirited debate by submitting a comment or video response to Senator Dodd's video.



Yours,

Ramya Raghavan

YouTube News & Politics

More about → Over 500 Ways to Reform Health Care

The Best Dunker on YouTube Crowned

After viewing and voting on an incredible group of dunkers, you've spoken and chosen the winner of YouTube Slam Dunk Challenge, a competition honoring the most talented hoopsters on YouTube. We're proud to announce WhiteFlightBD as The Best Dunker on YouTube! Here's his winning video:







WhiteFlightBD will receive a prize package including signed gear from our panel of super-judges Chris Bosh and Jalen Rose, and he'll perform with Team Flight Brothers at a dunk event (subscribe to Team Flight Brothers channel and stay tuned for video of that event). Coming in second, third and fourth place, respectively, were keithkegerreis44, joshsherrod1978 and MeanDuckDunker. They're featured with WhiteFlightBD on YouTube's homepage today. In addition to our top four finishers, our judges selected paleprodigies as the Round Two Open Submissions winner. Check out his video here.



Big ups to the hundreds of high-flying dunkers who submitted videos to the contest and to the thousands of community members who voted. We're constantly amazed by the talented people using YouTube every day.



Best,


Andrew Bangs


YouTube Sports

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Share YouTube Videos on Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader

As we learned in kindergarten, sharing is good. We want you to be able to do more of it with your videos. With a simple one-time log-in on our upload page, you can now have your YouTube account automatically update your Facebook friends, Twitter followers, and Google Reader shared items when you upload a video.



If you change your mind, you can shut it off at any time. And of course, for those videos that you'd rather not share, mark them as private and they won't be sent to any other site. We hope this makes it easier to share your good times with your friends.



Cheers,

Brian Glick

Product Manager

The YouTube Team

More about → Share YouTube Videos on Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader