Tonight the TV told me that John Howard is on YouTube.

Interesting – I just came out of a panel discussion where one of the questions was how content authors and marketers should engage with their audience in the modern online world.

But John Howard on YouTube… I have sneaking (like an stampede of elephants sneaking up on Stevie Wonder) suspicion that this is going to go very very badly.

I search on Google and find this and this.

The comments on his myspace page are as expected. 

At least the page didn’t make my eyes bleed.

I go to YouTube, enter John Howard in the search box.

And I get these…

Then I realise that I need to list them by “Date Added” Not the default order of “Relevance”.

I wonder how many people will bother to do that – or even see the option? I only saw it when I was cropping the screen grab. Someone missed the modal user-journey. Oh dear.

I now easly find the video and the most likely legitimate user that posted it.

http://www.youtube.com/user/JohnHoward2007

A typical comment of substance was

“using a medium to appeal to the ‘youth’ with a speech that would interest maybe 30-40+ year olds?”

The rest of the comments can’t be posted on my blog without affecting my net-nanny rating.

Oh dear..

This is less of a conversation and more of a broadcast to the nation. Just how do you have a conversation on YouTube? The top tier conversations are done in video replies – this reduces the text comments to the peanut gallery. If John was to get back on and actually reply to some of the sane posts – in video – that would be something special. Given the volume of comments – he should reply to his own video and address some of the comments directly.

Can a politician in a poll driven world afford to engage in conversation with an individual when they get further by talking to an issue?

I wonder if there are remixes of it yet? Some of the re-posts have been replaced with

This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.

I see a few clones of it already. The substitutes are on their way.

I await the great streaming inevitable.