This week heralded the launch of Barack Obama's new regular video address - he plans to publish weekly on YouTube throughout his Presidency.

The President-Elect used new media tools like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to devastating effect during his campaign...you can only wonder how he might employ social media to engage with not only US citizens, but also the wider World over the next four years. 

It's also going to be interesting to see how quickly politicians in the UK start to seriously adopt Web 2.0 tools as a means of engaging the electorate - I can see them playing a major role in the 2010 General Election campaign.

I took delivery of one of Kodak's new Zi6 pocket video cameras this week and have been testing it out...first impressions are pretty good.

The camera retails at £129.99 and let's you record in HD and VGA - like the Flip Video Ultra and Mino it comes with software that let's you easily edit and upload your videos to You Tube. It comes in two colours, black and pink and no, I didn't go for the latter!

The internal memory is pretty small and only lasts seconds if you're recording in HD - luckily though, the camera comes with an SD memory card slot that takes up to 32GB cards.   

The HD quality is great, particularly when played back on an HD TV, but note when filming you'll need a really steady hand or a tripod, since the camera doesn't have image stabilisation.

All in all, I'd say it's well worth £129.99 - check it out at Amazon. 

One of our latest projects went live this week - the production of video and audio podcasts for LGE (Local Government Employers) on the topic of 'Equal Pay'.

We worked closely with LGE's web team to craft their 'podcast pages' equipping them with media players, RSS Feeds, one-click subscription links and numerous download options to ensure that their target audience could consume the content as easily as possible. Check out the results of our efforts at www.lge.gov.uk/podcasts.

OK...so it's 7.00pm, I'm sitting at my computer and what am I doing...I'm watching a live webcast from a rally in Richmond, Virginia where Presidential hopeful Barack Obama is delivering another passionate speech...it's pretty surreal really!

I've been following the Presidential campaign pretty closely, not only because I have a healthy interest in politics but also because it's the first time Web 2.0 tools have been really embraced by politicians in a major election...particularly by Senator Obama - who is reputed to have raised millions of dollars by engaging potential voters with Blogs, You Tube videos, Facebook groups and regular 'Tweets' from Twitter to name but a few.

His campaign website is well worth checking out to see how a savvy politician and communicator is utilising social media, visit the site at www.barackobama.com

By the way, the live webcast came courtesy of Ustream.tv - an amazing site where you can watch a myriad of live broadcasts. 

We presented at a couple of events this week in Bristol and Manchester - the audiences were made up of training professionals who wanted to learn more about how web audio and video can increase the effectiveness of e-learning programs.

We always try to make our presentations as interactive as possible and showed a number of our latest favourite web videos. One that went down particularly well, was from Nottingham University - their Chemistry department have developed a series of videos that explain in a fun and engaging way, all 117 elements of the 'Periodic Table'!

The series is a powerful example of how creative and well executed web videos can demystify a complex subject such as Chemistry and make it accessible to us all...and did I mention that the videos have been viewed over 2.7 million times to date!!!

Check out the trailer below for a flavour of what the videos are all about - if that wets your appetite and you want to see all the individual videos, visit www.periodicvideos.com or their YouTube channel.

An interesting study by Boston based consulting firm Cone states that 93% of Americans believe that a company should have a presence on social media sites and 85 percent believe that these companies should use these services to interact with consumers.

Some other interesting stats from the survey are:

• 60% of Americans regularly interact with companies on a social media site
• 43% of consumers say that companies should use social networks to solve the consumers' problems
• 41% believe that companies should use social media tools to solicit feedback on products and services
• Men are more likely to use social media tools to interact with a company than women (33% vs. 17%)

As yet, I haven't seen any stats on how consumers in the UK feel about interacting with companies via a social media environment, but looking at these sort of numbers from across the pond, it's certainly something that all organisations should consider investigating further.

The latest web video production for one of our clients went live today - Kids Allowed, the ward winning childcare company, now have two brand new videos on their website.

We'd done some audio podcast work with Jennie Johnson (MD of Kids Allowed) in the early summer and having been impressed with the results, she was really keen to take it to the next level. So Jennie asked us to develop some fun and engaging web videos that could market her business to both potential customers and employees.

The end result was that we produced two videos, one focused on marketing the vast array of services and benefits available to customers and the second that promotes the fantastic career opportunities and rewards available at Kids Allowed to job seekers.

The videos sit on the home and careers section of the Kids Allowed website or you can watch them below.    

Customer Web Video

Careers Web Video

Confused about Web 2.0?

This great video will help to clarify things.

Yesterday Google launched an open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The browser is designed to be fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia.

Called Chrome, it will launch as a beta for Windows machines in 100 countries, with Mac and Linux versions to come.

The new browser will help Google take advantage of developments it is pushing online in rich web applications that are challenging traditional desktop programs.

The launch of a beta version of Chrome represents Google's latest assault on Microsoft's dominance of the PC business. The firm's Internet Explorer program dominates the browser landscape, with 80% of the market.

For further detail, read 'Google takes on Microsoft with browser' from Tuesday's Times.

So you think that Google is the world's favourite internet search engine? Not in every country so I've learned!

In Russia, Yandex is the leading search engine, with 55% of the market compared to Google's 21%. Check out what Wikipedia has to say about Yandex.

According to an article in today's Sunday Times, Yandex - set up by mathematician Arkady Volozh eight years ago, is now worth an estimated £2.5 billion and is the world's second most popular non-English search engine after China's Baidu.

Yandex is also planning to open an office in Silicon Valley, headed by one of Yahoo's former senior vice presidents and this autumn will very likely be floated on the Nasdaq exchange - making it the largest IPO yet in Russian technology.