Israel’s next prime minister is supposed to be elected on February 10th, and recent events have served as a clear reminder of this position’s importance. It’s rather impressive, then, that YouTube users have been asked to submit questions for the candidates to answer.
Video clips containing questions for Ehud Barak, Tsipi Livni, and Benjamin Netanyahu will be collected and then voted upon. The winning clips “will be aired in live public forums on Channel 2 news, Israel’s most popular news channel,” according to a post on the YouTube Blog. The people in the clips will get to attend the candidates’ interviews, too.
This development demonstrates how YouTube is becoming much more important in the world. Unfortunately for most would-be onlookers, the Q&A is being conducted in Hebrew (and the official YouTube elections channel is in the same language), but if anything, the prominence of something other than English stresses the international aspect. (We might get lucky and see YouTube’s captioning feature get used, too.)
Israel’s government has actually been on something of a Web 2.0 binge lately, with official info about the Gaza conflict getting posted on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. At this rate, questions for the candidates may well center on social media itself in addition to more standard recession- and war-related stuff.
Anyway, it looks like a lot of people are interested in interviewing the potential prime ministers. The YouTube Blog notes, “So far, over 250 video questions have been submitted.”
