Your YouTube Congress January 13, 2009

We have a new Congress and a new way of doing business. Yesterday it was announced by House and Senate leaders that we can now find our Representatives and Senators YouTube channels (did you know they each had one?) on two new platforms:

The House Hub

The Senate Hub

I sampled what my senator — Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) — has to offer on his channel and it’s fairly substantive. Nine videos and the usual line up for subscriptions, e-mail, friending, and sharing. Senator Webb also puts out an e-mail newsletter and next time it hits my in box, I’m going to check and see if they list this YouTube channel on it. Cross-promotion is key in terms of building video buzz and not taking advantage of a senate office’s enormous e-mail database would be quite the lost opportunity.

SEO Comes to the Federal Government December 11, 2008

Peter Whoriskey writes in The Washington Post today about the U.S. government’s work with search engine giants Google and Microsoft in opening up previously “hidden” site pages for better SEO. Virtually millions of federal Web pages are largely invisible to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search engines mostly because the data, while public, can only be accessed after filling out an online form and crawlers generally skip over these kind of databases. To make databases visible, the feds have to make each item into a Web page and then provide a list of those Web page URLs to the search engines.

The Post article notes some grumbling by federal information technology officials over the costs and manpower needed to transition their sites — the Smithsonian alone gave Google 78,000 links. But given that users these days expect immediate gratification to search queries or else will usually exit the site, it looks like a necessary step in the right direction to better serve the public as well as building site traffic.