• YouTube: A True Political Democracy, or Soapbox for Transvestites?
  

  YouTube took its video-sharing network off to Spain in the not too distant past, and teamed up with a local news station to take advantage of the nation’s election of a new prime minister. This was done in a manner similar to YouTube’s partnership with CNN for the Q&A sessions held between candidates and users. Weeks after announcing its plans for video sessions to be held in Spain, we get to see the results.

  Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was oh, so politically correct with his rhetoric that it makes you remember why you always switch to a cable channel when a State of the Union Address cuts into your viewing of Deal or No Deal. But as Jason Webb mentions in a Reuters report, there’s more to YouTube Q&A than just the tame questions that the politicians choose to answer. The fact that we get to see all the videos of questions people have addressed to the candidates is just as important.

  

  And for Zapatero, one of those clips happens to be of a man wearing a pearl necklace and a little black dress. He’s not too happy about Zapatero’s slant on same-sex marriage. So even if the politicians don’t answer every single video question and statement that’s been addressed to them, the rest of us get an even more direct and centralized manner in which to observe and participate in the conversations that occur around political issues and representatives that matter to us.

  
  
• LinkedIn Releases New Firefox Toolbar
  

  LinkedIn in this evening has announced the launch of version 3.1 toolbar specifically for FireFox. This is an update to their existing toolbar, currently in use by around 100,000 LinkedIn users. Getting folks to install a toolbar in their browsers these days is a bit like getting folks to sign up for a root canal, so they’ve tried to pack in the features to this version that will help convince you to give up a bit of valuable screen real estate.

  In this version, they’ve updated support for the Info box for the web mail service of your choice, including Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, and GMail. There’s also improved support for many popular Internet job sites, including Jobs Insider for Monster, Hotjobs, Craigslist, CareerBuilder, Dice and Vault.

  For those on the job market, presently (attention, ex-Yahooers), the nifty feature is that when browsing these various job sites, you’ll get access to a browser toolbar-exclusive feature called the Jobs Insider. It will alert you to any of the contacts you or your network may have inside of the company you’re looking at the information for (perfect for name dropping in your application cover letter).

  Outside of the job search arena, the toolbar will allow you to look up people instantly from any website and, of course, allow you one-click access to your LinkedIn account. The toolbar is available for IE users as well (currently in version 3.0). For more information on the Firefox toolbar, see the LinkedIn FF Toolbar FAQ.