From Marshall Kirkpatrick at Splashcast comes word of an interesting development at YouTube: the launch of a dedicated politics “channel,” hosted (if that’s the right word) by news and politics editor Steve Grove, which aims to aggregate all the political video clips that get uploaded to the Tube (so far there are only 10, and the channel has about 500 subscribers).
But I would expect this channel is going to involve more than just aggregating — or at least I hope so. I (and plenty of other people) have already seen Steve Grove interview Phil De Vellis, aka ParkRidge47, about why he created the Hillary Clinton Vote Different/1984 video, and if the new YouTube “editor” does more of that kind of interviewing things could get very interesting indeed (Phil De Vellis, incidentally, is going to be a panelist at the upcoming mesh conference in Toronto, which I am helping to organize).
With YouTube hosting a politics channel, and Huffington Post working with NewAssignment.net to field a bunch of citizen journalists, the upcoming U.S. election campaign could be very interesting indeed. If YouTube were still a small startup, this might be seen as a “power to the people” kind of move, but now that the video site is part of the Googleplex, there are already some — like Republican media strategist David All — who are concerned about the amount of power and influence Google has.