White House videos from YouTube using Widgebox Pro

I signed up for a Blidget Pro account this morning after realizing that you can't put a video feed in a Blidget (Widgetbox's feeds widget) unless you pay. It's $3.95 a month and you can go month to month. I wonder if they take the widgets away from their users if you cancel.

I'd beta-tested the Pro features briefly a few weeks ago, and found the online building tool a little cumbersome, and I still do. I'm not one to read documentation, expecting that I should be able to experiment and figure things out in short order. There are still a few things I'd like to see more customizable, like that black border around the body of the feed content and the ability to remove the gradient behind the slide buttons.

It's better than OK, though. I'm just fussy.

A few notes on my little web journey in making it:

- YouTube still doesn't make its feed addresses apparent. You have to go searching for how to construct them, and ironically you find the best results in YouTube explainer videos. In this case I used the YouTube account's username. So the feed is http://youtube.com/rss/username/whitehouse.rss. You can also use tags, like this: http://youtube.com/rss/tag/president+radio+address+obama+weekly+radioaddress.rss but then you'd get wingnuts, and I might play around with a widget including those, or not.

It's the third time in recent weeks that I've wondered how committed Google really is to the distributed web versus keeping users on their pages. For example, Google Gadgets are very easy to add to an iGoogle start page, but the pages containing the embed code (so you can place one on an external page) are kind of hidden – not included as a matter of course in the share button when a user places the gadget. I always have to go on a circuitous hunt for the page if I want to provide the link to embed a Gadget on a blog.

Another example. Steve Gillmor took Google to task for slow Feedburner updates earlier this month. Google acquired Feedburner in 2007. You have to wonder if providing untimely feeds serves Google's interests better than serving up speedy feeds. Do I think Eric Schmidt put in a call to the Feedburner team and ordered a slowdown? No. Do I think it's possible the feeds slowed down for whatever reason, and investing in speeding them up wasn't a priority as high as the priorities for other projects? Maybe.

Black helicopter nonsense? Could be. But a common thread runs through each of the three cases. Technically Google makes things mashable, so they can say "We're open." Practically, they make a masherupper jump through extra hoops, or suffer some penalty, to distribute content on pages that don't earn money for Google. It's their right, of course, but we don't have to help them pretend their policies are completely altruistic. The pattern of pulling back on the reins in little ways is a reminder that Google is a company watching out mainly for its own interests after all.

- Whitehouse.gov had the weekly "radio" address up bright and early Saturday morning. Points for that. Subtract one point for not having the video feed ready yet. The whitehouse channel on YouTube does not, as of 9:50 a.m. Eastern, include the newest Saturday address. Update: it was on YouTube by 11 a.m. Saturday, possibly sooner.

- A funny thing. I didn't represent my widget as an official White House product, and said so in the footer. However, I do like the Obama blue and wanted to match my background color to a shade of it, so I went to whitehouse.gov for a look. This is the background image under the site's main wide horizontal slideshow box. Check the file name, hero_bg.jpg. A worshipper at the keyboard in the Photoshop ranks. That's kind of cute.

- Whitehouse.gov content is licensed under Creative Commons' most permissive attribution license. I learned this the way I discover most news these days, on Twitter, in this case in a tweet from Denise Howell.