YouTube and C-SPAN have partnered to launch a program to allow voters the opportunity to voice their views on the issues most important to them in the 2008 election.

YouTube Voter Video on C-SPAN is encourages voters to respond to the question “What issue in this election is most important to you, and why?”

From now until the eve of the Pennsylvania primaries on April 22, you can upload videos to C-SPAN’s YouTube channel. Each submission should focus on a single issue and include the name and hometown of the person submitting the video.

Ideally, videos will include a visual context for the issues they address, and mention the candidate best-equipped to tackle the topic at hand. A selection of videos will air on C-SPAN beginning Sunday, April 13 on Road to the White House and during other network political programming.

In addition to online submissions, voters in Pennsylvania will have the opportunity to record their videos from the C-SPAN Campaign 2008 Bus. 

“As candidates enter the final stretch of this exciting primary, we offer voters the chance to voice their opinions on the issues that matter most in this race,” said Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics. “We are especially pleased to join with C-SPAN to inspire voters as they address issues that will affect Americans and the global community when the forty-fourth president takes the oath of office in 2009.”

 

The Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma, California is expanding its reach, using YouTube to bring things like the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest (above) to the world. 

“The purpose of a fair is to celebrate and showcase the community. Fairs are social events and social media is perfect for fairs because of this. We’re inviting folks to participate online, to, in effect, start their fair experience early,” said Fair CEO Patricia Conklin. ”

The Fair’s YouTube presence is an interesting example of how an organization can leverage the free video site to jump into social media. It would be great, though, if they could also incorporate visitor video contributions. 

The Sonoma-Marin Fair runs June 18 to 22 at the Petaluma Fairgrounds. This year’s theme is Home Grown, World Known. 

The Rolling Stones have launched a new channel on YouTube, Living Legends.

Visitors can upload video questions for the band, and the best questions will be answered by the Stones.

It’s an interesting use of the site, but I’d like to see them experimenting with letting fans make creative use of Stones music or music videos.

YouTube Doubler lets you watch two YouTube videos at the same time, so you can watch David Hasselhoff vs Elmo, Blue Man Group vs The Who or River Dance vs Robot Dance

The SFGate has a profile of podcasting novelist Scott Sigler that looks at how he’s used free podcasts to promoting his writing career:

Before Sigler revealed podcasting as a new frontier for book promotion, the San Francisco author was rebuffed hundreds of times by major publishers. Sigler’s science fiction-horror thrillers attracted little attention.

That changed in 2005, when he offered his first novel, “Earthcore,” as a free, downloadable 22-episode podcast on iTunes and his own Web site, www.scottsigler.com. A few hundred early listeners soon swelled to 5,000. By the time he posted “Ancestor” and “The Rookie,” his second and third books, which he also narrated, he had 30,000 digital disciples.

Sigler refers to these loyal listeners as junkies because they keep coming back for more. It was the junkies who helped him land a deal with Dragon Moon Press, a small Canadian fantasy and science fiction publisher that liked the idea of a newbie author with a sizable following. It was the junkies who helped Sigler’s “Ancestor” climb to No. 7 in overall sales on Amazon.com, which played a role in landing him a deal with the Crown Publishing Group.

On Tuesday, Sigler’s latest book, “Infected,” a tale of biological possession, was released by Crown. A free digital manuscript of the book was downloaded 45,000 times in just 100 hours since the Crown book was released, according to the publisher. And while Sigler still offers his novels as free podcasts, he is confident that the junkies will shell out $24.95 for a fix they might already have tried.

“How do I get them to buy a book they may have already listened to?” Sigler said. “I ask them to.”

Scott’s publisher at Crown, Tina Constable, suggests that podcasting and new media are essential tools for publishers.

“The wave of the future is how we harness the Internet to find these new readers, and we are devoting an enormous amount of energy and resources into this effort. The traditional model for publishing our books is quickly becoming obsolete and we recognize that creative Internet strategies are necessary if we want to remain competitive.”

The Idaho Potato Commission (IPC) has launched one of the stranger user-generated video contests ever, iTuber Take II. They are inviting potato lovers from across the country to create videos featuring potatoes.

In celebration of the International Year of the Potato, the Idaho Potato Commission has launched a special category just for Idaho high school students with cash prizes for the student winner and his/her high school

The Prizes

iOne Grand Prize winner will be awarded $3,000 CASH and two Runners Up will each receive $1,000. All qualified entrants will receive an MP3 player.

Idaho High School Students

One winner will receive a $100 Savings Bond and his/her high school will win $250. All entrants will also receive an MP3 player.

Yeah – this is pretty far off-topic – but it’s Quake on the iPhone!

This highlights that the iPhone has a lot more potential as a platform than as just a phone.

What would you like to see running on the iPhone?

via Scott at Hermitworks

The schedule for the fourth annual New Media Expo has been announced by event organizer Tim Bourquin. Formerly known as the Podcast and New Media Expo, and/or the Portable Media Expo, this year’s updated and expanded event sports a new name, and has moved from California to Las Vegas.

The New Media Expo, which runs from August 14 – 16, still sorts sessions into subject-area “tracks,” ranging from beginner topics to advanced. Attendees are welcome to mix-and-match sessions from any track. The first day alone features twenty different panels and presentations that range from building community, to corporate podcast success stories, to government podcasting, to storytelling, sound editing, and “premium” podcasting.

I asked Tim about the changes for this year’s Expo.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: Why drop the word “podcasting” from the name of the event?

Tim Bourquin: Even though the event still has a major focus on podcasting, we took the word out of the name of the event because it was becoming redundant – like calling an event the “Book and Publishing Expo.” Podcasting is another form of new media and most of our attendees have blogs, use twitter and video blog as well so it just made sense to include that content as well. We wanted people to know we were about much more than just podcasts.

Elisabeth McLaury Lewin: What precipitated the move from Ontario (California) to Vegas?

Tim Bourquin: We moved the event to Las Vegas for a couple reasons. After three years in Ontario, we wanted to take the event to a more destination city to make it easier for our East Coast attendees to fly in, but also having the conference in Las Vegas shows we’re serious about growing the industry. Having the event is a major tradeshow city is one way we’re shooing the world that new media can compete with traditional media and is not just on the sidelines that has their convention in an out-of-the-way location.

The fourth annual New Media Expo runs August 14 – 16, 2008, at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada.

Remember all the goofy things you did as a kid, and how you’re glad sometimes that people don’t know about them?

Things are different now. With YouTube, today’s kids are completely pwned.

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog has a great post that looks at a terrifying and hysterical sub-genre of YouTube videos: AP English classes’ takes on the literary classics.

Here are a few that sort of had me spewing coffee out my nose.

Siddhartha, In Garrubavision!!!:

NSFW! Contains topless guys in genie pants.

A Rose For Emily:

Catcher In The Ghetto:

NPR’s John Schaeffer takes on the skeletons in your musical closet on the latest WNYC Soundcheck:

Everybody has a dirty little secret from his or her pop-music past.

They go far beyond guilty pleasures. Everybody has songs, albums, concerts, and other fan moments too embarrassing to remember and/or too shameful to acknowledge.

Host John Schaefer — who owns up to his initial attraction to Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” — talks to culture writer Cintra Wilson, of Salon.com and The New York Times, and music journalist Anne Midgette, acting classical-music critic for the Washington Post, about their dirty musical secrets.

For Wilson, it’s “Love Me in a Special Way” by the ’80s R&B band DeBarge. “I mean, it really goes beyond just a guilty pleasure into a mortifying skeleton in my closet,” she says. “Or actually, I was thinking of it more about — like, sort of admitting that I have an inflatable sheep in my bedroom.”

It’s a funny show, and will also have you thinking about the influence that the music industry and radio have had on controlling what you listen to.

I have to confess to having a quite a skeletons in my musical closet, ranging from Mannheim Steamroller, ELP and Moody Blues albums to Britney Spears’ Toxic.

What’s the skeleton in your music closet? ABBA? Air Supply? Barry Manilow?