Jon Udell suggests the government have an opt-in $3 Citizen Media Fund (to complement the already-existing Presidential Campaign Fund) to pay for the aggregation and tagging of raw video footage of the candidates so that citizens can “slice and dice what politicians and pro pundits say, by candidate and by issue, across venues, recombine that material to support a whole new level of scrutiny and analysis.” Every question and every answer ought to be tagged, as Jon suggests elsewhere.

I of course like the prospect of having a huge pile of well-tagged candidate videos — it’s so miscellaneous! — but I think there’s zero prospect of this coming through the government. Nor should it. We’ve got the pile, thanks to YouTube and the candidate’s own sites. If we get it tagged well enough, someone will build a site that lets us search through them and cluster them. And if someone builds a site, we’ll tag ’em well enough. It could be a citizen group, a media site, or YouTube or Technorati. One way or another, this is likely to happen no check-off boxes required. [Tags: elections politics campaigns jon_udell everything_is_miscellaneous ]