the great aeropagus

Here, from the White House Blog, in his first weekly YouTube video address since being sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, President Barack Obama discusses how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan will jump-start the economy.

I haven't watched it all the way through (which maybe reflects the value of the exercise), but it is astounding the think how quickly blogs and inline video have gone mainstream. I remember feeling eccentric when I was first fiddling about with them.

All this in the same week as Benedict XVI has used the Vatican YouTube channel to tell us that the internet is a new way to speak of God.

It's all very intriguing though - to my mind - curiously reminiscent of the tendency of super villains in Batman to announce their nefarious schemes by taking over all the channels of all the screens in Gotham simultaneously.