YouTube/Google video

I don't often use youtube or google video, and when I do it is usually through a link from a news magazine website (such as "the onion") and ninety percent of the time the motivation is to get a laugh out of it. However, I can also see the vast array of possibilities for libraries - a great way to involve youth at the library (make a short movie set in a library, etc), personal histories, documentation of change in progress in "our town" and so on. Politically, as with the internet in general, video share sites can be a great way of exposing injustices in places that have strict media controls, and expose plights which are routinely ignored by mainstreem media. But of course that begs the question of how you would be exposed to such information if you weren't looking for it in the first instance? I could go on a long rant about media control, manufactured consent and hegemony here but I'll refrain. I will say that video share sites (as with the internet in general) are a potentially democratizing force - at least for the very small minority of the world's population who actually have access to it.