Egyptian protest footage on YouTube

It’s been hard to open a laptop or turn on the television over the last week without hearing news of the unrest in Egypt. On YouTube, thousands of videos of the protests have poured in, whether as unfiltered footage from the demonstrations themselves, or as news reports from our media partners around the globe.

We understand how closely the world is following these events, and want to help people access and share this information quickly and easily on YouTube. We’re helping people do this in three ways:

• Highlighting the latest footage on CitizenTube, our news and politics channel, and inviting people to submit video they’ve come across.
• Pointing our users directly to these videos through banners at the top of YouTube pages, and through links alongside YouTube videos.
• Streaming live coverage of Al Jazeera’s broadcasts about the unfolding events, on both their Arabic and English YouTube channels.

And our Google colleagues have also turned on a speak-to-tweet service to help people in Egypt stay connected at this difficult time.

Here’s a playlist of videos that have come in:



YouTube has used similar tools and live streaming technologies in the past to give our users access to information on major world news events, such as the Haiti earthquake and the protests in Iran. We hope this footage provides a unique window into the events unfolding in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and many other cities across Egypt.

Olivia Ma, YouTube News and Politics, recently watched “28th Jan. 2011 - Storyful - Kasr Al Nile Bridge clashes.”

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Your Interview with President Obama

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.”

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Your YouTube questions for the President

In around an hour’s time, U.S. President Barack Obama will sit down for his first post-State of the Union interview – and you might be the interviewer.

Last week we announced that the President would address a selection of your questions in a special YouTube interview. The deadline for question submissions was midnight ET on Wednesday, January 26, and at that time more than 190,000 people had cast more than 1.3 million votes on nearly 140,000 questions.

Tune in to youtube.com/askobama at 2:30 p.m. ET to see and hear the President’s responses to a selection of your top-voted questions, streamed live from the White House.

Here’s a selection of just some of the thousand questions that were submitted, on topics ranging from health care, to university education, to jobs, to sports.



Olivia Ma, News and Politics Manager, recently watched "Ask President Obama."

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Join Life in a Day tonight for its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival

On July 24, 2010, thousands of people around the world uploaded videos of their lives to YouTube to take part in “Life in a Day,” a historic cinematic experiment to document a single day on earth. From Australia to Zambia, more than 80,000 videos, totaling 4,500 hours of footage, were submitted to the project. After months of hard work, Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and a team of editors have created a 90-minute documentary film that gives a surprising, honest and entertaining self-portrait of our world.



While “Life in a Day” will be officially released later this year, tonight you have a very special opportunity to tune in to the world premiere direct from the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. The premiere will be followed by a live Q&A with Kevin Macdonald and key contributors to the film. You can submit questions for the Q&A here.

Tonight’s stream begins at 5pm PT/8pm ET on the Life in a Day channel. If you’re outside of the United States, you can catch a rebroadcast on Friday, January 28, at 7pm in your local time zone, captioned and subtitled in 25 additional languages, with an additional option for audio description (AD) in English.

We hope you enjoy the film!

Tim Partridge, Product Marketing Manager, recently watched “Life in a Day: A new type of filmmaking”.

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