Over the years, YouTube’s been used for increasingly serious purposes. Now, we’ve apparently reached the point at which those purposes are important and numerous enough to get their own blog, as Google’s set something called Citizentube (with zero capital “t”s, yes) aside to cover them.
A post on the Official Google Blog explained, “[Y]ou 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.”
And although it looks like posts will appear at the rate of at least one per day, a Citizentube RSS feed and Twitter account are available if you don’t feel like checking the Citizentube site every so often.
Anyway, the most recent Citizentube entry is quite interesting, touching on the Iranian election and censorship conflict by showing people how to circumvent Internet proxies. Before that, Senator Chris Dodd responded to user-submitted ideas for healthcare reform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxKedyipvcMThe Official Google Blog post acknowledged this mix of topics by continuing, “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.”
Citizentube looks to be an intriguing – and important – site.