YouBama and the citizen-generated campaign

I'm loving Google Reader these days. I can consume blog posts, podcasts and video much more quickly and easily than ever before -- and that makes me happy.

This past week, I've been able to enjoy sharing and receiving shared items with friends who are also rocking Reader within the interface. I can see the appeal of Google's approach to social networking and bookmarking.

Your email address book is effectively your network. Your shared bookmarks become a living stream of of your online consciousness.

Facebook may aspire to become our primary online destination -- the recent releases of Facebook apps into the Web at large is a major step in that direction -- but Google's communication and productivity apps are beginning to be linked in ways that reveal the wisdom of the crowds in new ways.

All that aside, I discovered YouBama today through my RSS feeds and TechCrunch's post... I'll be watching those feeds too now.

Online video just gained has yet another outlet, one independent from the campaigns, that just received an avalanche of coverage from Tech Crunch's coverage.

YouTube still dwarfs this site, of course, along with the rest of the mainstream media.

Nonetheless, it's noteworthy to see how much control the campaigns have now lost over "the message" -- and how enabled we have all become in sharing our own opinions.

Democracy is going P2P.

Watch YouTube inside of Google Reader

Steve Rubel posted about an announcement from Google that he calls "significant." I think he could be guilty of understatement, but let his words speak for themselves.

Earlier this week Google made a significant change to Google Reader. You can now watch videos from dozens of sites without having to leave the reader. This means you can set up a RSS search feed, from say YouTube, and watch them all as a playlist in reader.

What Google didn't mention is that if you have the Google Reader widget on your Google Personalized Homepage you can actually watch all of these videos right within the page itself.

Page views? What page views? If no one is actually visiting your site, how do you monetize and sustain your business model? Creating meaningful social media metrics will be quite a challenge in this age of feeds, where content can be stripped of much of the branding, advertising or even authorship by a feed browser like Reader or Sage. I think it's about influence. At least, that's what some wiser blogging heads than I seem to believe.

Update: I subscribed to the most viewed feed from YouTube and then zipped over to Reader. Sure enough, the embedded Reader widget on my Google homepage now will pop up a window with a YouTube video embedded and playable within it. Cool.