With 143,000 views in 4 days - YouTube has made Mike Gravel relevant - if not entirely credible. While most news outlets focused on the strength of John Edwards following the debate, a clip of Gavel’s feisty remarks was making the rounds on Youtube. In a Washington Post editorial, Joel Achenbach compared the lively Gravel to Howard Beale saying “At one point I feared he might bite someone.”

The video of Gavel clips edited together by Youtube user and blogger delphinius, has become the most viewed of the debate videos posted thus far.

While MSNBC’s official stance on internet usage of the debate has been to prohibit it flat out, there doesn’t appear to have been any DMCA activity relating to the many clips online including those posted (technically illegally) by the campaign of Joe Biden.

Several mainstream news organizations have started covering what Advertising Age in an article today calls “the YouTube presidential election.” Jeff Jarvis‘ new site PrezVid.com, has been the single best source of information on this topic - albeit heavily editorialized.

MSNBC meanwhile is pointing everyone to their video site where users can watch the debate legally, in its entirety. Unfortunately for those seeking to do this, there is no direct link to debate footage from the MSNBC homepage. The debate is posted in MSNBC’s video portal powered by the MSN Video (beta) player and there are no options to link to it - let alone embed a clip.

For some of the best online election coverage check out the candidate channels at YouTube’s YouChoose ‘08. UGC By the candidates themselves.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 30th, 2007 at 12:10 am and is filed under News, Politics, User Generated, Video Portals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.