Fireside YouTube

As this week's digital rhetoric guest James Kotecki points out in "Get YouTube-worthy!" the Obama administration has embraced using YouTube as a vehicle for his twenty-first century fireside chats, on the assumption that the regular presidential radio address of the sitting incumbant wasn't reaching a very large constituency. Obama's first video on global warming issues -- with its desk, flag, fishbowl, and legal tomes -- is shot on a set that is unlikely to garner much of the attention economy of YouTube or rack up any design points for web-savvy presentation.