Mike Wesch of Kansas State University is among our favourite commentators on social media and culture.

Here’s a new 33-minute talk from him called The Machine is (Changing) Us – YouTube and the Politics of Authenticity. (I said ‘new’ but he does reuse some parts from a previous talk about YouTube which you may have seen).

In the course of this entertaining talk he mentions: Neil Postman’s ‘Amusing Ourselves To Death’, television, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Marshall McLuhan, free hugs, narcissism, a history of “whatever”, a brief history of “meh”, video blogging, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. It’s well worth a look.

We just watched the video over a huge curry lunch. Let’s just say we don’t think we’ve fully digested either yet…

[ UPDATE 06/02/09: Comments have been enabled on Alastair Campbell's site, albeit in an unusual place. At the moment it's unclear whether they apply to the whole site or each individual post. Nevertheless, you can disregard some of my criticism below as Campbell is also responding personally. He explains that the original lack of comments was down to "first day teething troubles". ]

Alastair Campbell has somewhat belatedly launched his own text blog and video blog.

For someone so strongly linked with political communications in the UK, he’s a little late to the game. But I for one am a little intrigued about how he will choose to use it.

He’s also on Twitter now as @campbellclaret – presumably a reference to his chosen football team, Burnley.

First impressions? He talks about having discussions, but there is no comment facility on the blog. Why do high profile bloggers shy from this? People will talk about you, so you might as well encourage and “own” some of the discussion. A busy comments area brings people back, especially if there’s controversy. And Campbell is not unfamiliar with that.

He’d even retain the power to moderate comments, which is again something at which he’s had plenty of practice.

Otherwise they’ll use a system like Diigo to maintain annotations about your site elsewhere, as we saw with Whitehouse.gov recently.

Incidentally, call me picky but the convention is that the whole thing is referred to as a “blog” and one article is referred to as a “blog post”.

There’s also a video blog and the first entry (I mean post) is a very slickly-edited piece with some footage from the glory years with Tony Blair and the upbeat sounds of Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al” on the soundtrack (I wonder if they sought permission for this).

It’s entertaining.

I generally think people’s expectations of online video have lowered these days. Just shoot a quick and frank piece to camera from your living room – it’s cheap, it’s immediate and it feels more open and honest. With such high production values from the outset, I’ll be surprised if he can sustain this regularly.

The site Whitehouse.gov has just relaunched for the new US administration. We’ll be looking particularly at their blog as well as Barack Obama on Twitter and any other officially-sanctioned tools and sites, to see how the US government are embracing them.

If this flood of US news is getting too much, the Kazakh prime minister has not only started a blog but also ordered his ministers to start their own blogs.

This tag cloud was generated from Barack Obama’s speech and uploaded to the social photography site Flickr in double-quick time today. Here’s another.

Tag clouds have become a fascinating at-a-glance method of representing data. In this case, we see the words that Barack Obama has emphasised due to repetition.

Tag clouds began as a navigational aid for websites. Here’s a live example representing the content of the many thousands of pictures and photographs stored on Flickr itself. Each word is a link with the most common words given greater prominence.

I’m not sure which tool these used – if you want to generate your own, one such tool is Wordle.

Techcrunch have a wideranging list of a plethora of online sites and applications related to the event. These cover where to watch it, where to respond to it, approval ratings and more.

My favourite is probably the Obameter which tracks the status of 500 promises made by Obama during the USA election campaign.

I’ve previously mentioned Obama’s use of social media to gather supporters and communicate. If you’d like to read about that, here’s a good start.

So online media can assist politicians in gathering supporters. Can online media assist the electorate in holding politicians to account – and thereby improve the democratic process as a whole? It’s a huge question, I know. We can but hope. Actually it’s not just about hope – people have to USE these tools.

I hope you find these links useful. Although Native is based in Cardiff, Wales, I’m very guilty in this blog of being US-centric in my link recommendations. Although I will continue to reference useful US-based pages where relevant, I’ll also make an effort to redress the balance from now on!

In the meantime, if you’re interested in online tools related to politics and democracy in the UK then check out the various projects of mySociety. Game-changing stuff.