David on Formosa

Video sharing website YouTube yesterday launched a Taiwan version of its site. The Taiwan News reports:

The internationally popular Web site YouTube yesterday launched a local site "YouTube Taiwan" with a Chinese-language interface, in a bid to encourage more Taiwan users to share their video clips, not only with Chinese-language Web surfers, but also with others around the globe.

Steve Chen (陳士駿), one of YouTube's co-founders is Taiwanese. YouTube was launched in February 2005 and rapidly became popular. It was acquired by Google in October 2006 for US$1.65 billion. 

To coincide with the launch President Chen Shui-bian has his own YouTube channel (English version). From the President's website:

總統YouTube影音頻道，讓您更貼近總統日常生活的點點滴滴，認識不一樣的「阿扁
總統」，歡迎上網觀賞。

The President's YouTube channel can let you get close to some of the President's daily activities. Get to know another side of President A-bian, get on the internet and take a look.  [English translation by David]

President Chen also celebrated the sixth anniversary of his electronic newsletter. The Taipei Times reports:

President Chen Shui-bian's (陳水扁) weekly electronic newsletter celebrated its sixth year yesterday and a series of short films featuring the president were posted on Taiwan's YouTube to coincide with the launch of the video sharing Web site yesterday. The A-bian e-newsletter, with weekly updates on Thursday, has published 314 entries since its inauguration on Oct. 18, 2001, and has 123,000 subscribers.