Internet Life

YouBama, the YouTube and Obama Mongrel

Politics is sometimes very ingenious

By Vlad Constandes, SEO News Editor

30th of January 2008, 21:06 GMT

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If these elections are the YouTube elections, as many have said they would be, a similar site would mean a step ahead of the competition. That's what a couple of Barack Obama supporters thought and they came up with a mongrel between the popular video sharing site and Digg. Of course, the name of the product had to show who it was that they endorsed, so the choice to be made was obvious: YouBama.

It gives users the options to upload videos in which they explain why they

are supporting Obama and then the people viewing them have the option of voting the videos up and down, Digg style. The owners of the site, Christopher Pedregal and Eric Park, both Stanford grad students, have made it clear that they are not part of the presidential candidate's campaign. And they wrote this just below the copy of the YouTube logo: "The Citizen Generated Campaign".

The site has pretty good videos, featuring big names like George Clooney and "Sir" Charles Barkley, both supporters of Obama. Now I don't know why, I've been listening to Barkley at halftime for so long that I cannot even try to figure out when, and when I heard him saying that Barack Obama, in a private conversation that happened a couple of years ago, made him very excited about politics, I just had to sit back and think about it. This is a very well aimed campaign. Masterfully done too! First, by appealing to the NBA Hall of Famer the attention of the demographic bound to support Obama is instantly drawn. After that, by featuring George Clooney, the heartfelt opinion of the ball player is backed by some strong arguments and a sophisticated point of view.

The site is not trying to be more than it was meant for: a means of attracting some additional support for the candidate. The videos must be uploaded to YouTube first, the "more" link at the end of the description is sometimes empty, clicking it will actually get it out of view. There's no pointer when hovering the mouse over it and the list goes forward. But, and you know there's always a "but," it underlines that Obama is the most tech savvy of the lot and that his supporters are as well.

TAGS:

barack obama | obama | youtube | youbama | video

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