Queen for a Day

I've long said that British institutions associated with governance do a much better job using social media and video file-sharing sites than their U.S. counterparts, where American policy makers have developed some truly terrible government blogs, websites, and online videos in 2007, which will surely merit some attention in this year's Foley awards here on Virtualpolitik.

Now even the British Royal Family has its own channel on YouTube, The Royal Channel. The site is currently featuring the Queen's Christmas Message, which opens with a much younger queen addressing the populace through the one-to-many medium of black-and-white television. It is interesting to note that embedding has been disabled by the site's manager, so the context of the video can be preserved in the creator's chosen frame.

For more on this story, see "YouTube gets the royal treatment" in today's Los Angeles Times.