Who Wants to Be a Thousandaire?

As the budget page for the University of California Office of the President is overwhelmed with web traffic today, some are going directly to President Yudof's YouTube channel to see his latest video in which he explains his furlough/salary reduction proposal. (The chart he refers to is here.)

Many of the points addressed in his video seemed to be in response to widely circulated open letters that were disseminated via e-mail and web pages, such as the ones at UC Faculty and Administrators Comment on the Budget Crisis and the militant budget FAQ page for the UC branch of the American Federation of Teachers. A number of these statements have involved information graphics, as this piece on "Changing the Budget Climate: What Happens if We Don't" does as well from the Remaking the University blog.

What's interesting to me rhetorically is the fact that this video allows embedding, so it can be posted on blogs, social network profiles, and other websites, unlike an earlier video about budget bad news, for which embedding was disabled. Like other videos on the UC YouTube site, comments have been disabled, although viewers can still rate Yudof's videos with one to five stars. In this video Yudof also is more obviously reading from a script, and so therefore he is using his hands less to punctuate his dire assessment of the budget situation. In both videos he uses a backdrop of family photographs, although unlike other faculty talking heads on camera in their offices, the book in the background about California does not appear to be one of his own publications.

More on Yudof's earlier YouTube performance is here.