To the satisfaction of many who wondered, the revolution inauguration was indeed televised captioned.

Many accolades follow, and rightly so. The NAD gave a nod. Various other captioning advocates (such as slinkerwink over at DailyKos, etc) thank the captioning team that apparently, as Washington Post reports, worked against all odds:

One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.

Even conservatives over at RedState commend the Obama team in this regard.

But I am going to put a damper into this celebration. Notice that YouTube seems to have emerged as a de facto provider of important communication infrastructure to the government. Which would be perfectly fine, except that it appears that YouTube got a special dispensation from the federal privacy rules.

Are we witnessing a phenomenon that is the reverse of trademark genericide? One may use “to xerox” to mean “to copy”, or “kleenex” to mean “a tissue”. We are all familiar with that. But in today’s age, it seems that whenever “online video” is mentioned, “YouTube” is understood. While this is a great compliment to YouTube, is it good when the government does it?

How does this sit with the many Obama supporters that are proponents of Net Neutrality?

P.S. In a somewhat ironic (albeit unclear in what way exactly) twist on the subject of YouTube and accessibility to the Deaf community, YouTube now mutes some videos. I just thought I’d add that in there.

US Congress is getting its own YouTube channel. Dear Senators and Congressmen: please follow the laws you passed (does Section 508 ring a bell?), and make your videos accessible. We also agree with ReadWriteWeb’s criticism of top-down nature of this development:

[Q]uite a few Senators and Representatives decided not to allow comments on their videos. We would hope that more of our elected officials would value comments from their constituents.

But while the legislators may disable comments on YouTube, they won’t disable comments for videos embedded in the blogs — or on Overstream.net, for that matter. Which would make the YouTube channels mere video repositories, rather than portals; the discussion will happen elsewhere. Thwarting the authoritarian, centralized, top-down model like only the Internet can.

And now, moving from D.C. to the Holy See: His Holiness is coming to YouTube. Since the faithful are all over the globe, it’s encumbent upon this Vatican 2.0 (couldn’t resist) to be accessible in multiple languages. ChurchCrunch wonders if a digital version of the 95 Theses is to be expected. May we suggest to the next Martin Luther that they come in a form of an Overstream? We’d set up a special Schlosskirche page just for that.

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Gaurav makes a case that “the future of online video [journalism] will be driven by translation.” We are in vehement agreement. But may we suggest that providing context is another important facet of Journalism 2.0?
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In other news, we have added support for high-quality YouTube videos. Enjoy.