iPope

On the Baltimore Sun's website today, they ran a story today picked up from the AP, about the Pope, starting his own YouTube channel.

The story, which you can read in the link above, tells of how this is "the Vatican's newest effort to reach out to the members of the digital generation, and grant the Holy See a better control of the papal image online."

"The site, www.youtube.com/vaticanit, was launched the same day the pontiff praised as a "gift to humanity" the benefits of social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace in forging friendships and understanding.

But Benedict also warned that virtual socializing had its risks, saying "obsessive" online networking could isolate people from real social interaction and broaden the digital divide by further marginalizing people."

There is sooo much that excites me about this story. I don't know if the Vatican has been paying attention to You Tube over the past few years, but this is definitely got the makings of a train wreck in progress. I'm certain that they're still under the impression that the Internet has it's faults, but in no way accounted for the new level of assininery that You Tube granted to people. In particular, I'm waiting for the inevitable Pope mash-ups from people, who are much better at editing video than myself.

Just think about it, within a few weeks, we'll have tons of videos of the pope, like you've never seen him before!! I for one, am waiting diligently for Pope on a piano (eating popcorn). Or maybe someone will dub one of his speaches over the Beatles, or Jay Z. Even better, if the Pope has some down time to himself, he might set up his own personal YouTube channel, lonelypope15, and just tell us about what it's like to just be himself. But what I think we're all really waiting for, is when the Pope forgets to turn his webcam off after a broadcast, and cranks up his itunes and just decided to rock out. Germans like techno, right? Of course they do.

Until then, we can only wait.