There comes a moment in the life of every sitcom where a desperately uncool father tries to act hip around his children's friends. The results, disastrous as they always are, should have given the UK government pause as it contemplated its own attempt at hipness—putting some videos on YouTube.

The clips were uploaded by the Central Office of Information under the username "publicservice" and dealt with such YouTube-appropriate topics as "transformational government" and "sharing the leadership challenge." While a commendable attempt to get the word out about government plans to "save money by consolidating service departments," the videos didn't impress the Guardian's Charles Arthur. "Bluntly? Six minutes is far too long," he wrote last week. "The videos aren't paced for the youth market that YouTube really hits. If the Cabinet Office does want to see how its videos ought to look, it should offer the raw footage for video mashup artists to work with, and laugh when they mock it, which they will."

Actually, people are already mocking the COI, which was was forced to pull the videos soon after posting them because it turned out not to own the rights for online distribution of the clips.

YouTube isn't just a good place to embarrass the British government, though. The US government is also feeling some heat after a Lockheed Martin engineer posted a 10-minute video designed to blow the whistle on security and safety problems with the Coast Guard's Deepwater system.

Michael De Kort uploaded the video when he believed that he had no other options for making his concerns public. "My thought was, 'What could I do that would be novel enough that it draws attention to itself, and through drawing attention to itself, something gets done?'" De Kort explained to the Washington Post. De Kort was laid off a few days after posting the video, though Lockheed Martin said that job cuts have been coming for some time, and that De Kort was aware that his position would be affected.

A spokesperson for Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman, which jointly run the project, said, "Anybody with a webcam and something to say, regardless of whether it's true or not, can say it on YouTube"—and she's right (just think of the recent faux-amateur political attempt at smearing Al Gore with a YouTube video). YouTube and similar sites provide a great way to get around the "filter" of the traditional media, but the filter does exist for a good reason. When it's working correctly, it sifts out the chaff, presenting only stories that have been vetted for real merit (when it's not working correctly, articles about a guy who apparently did nothing to JonBenet Ramsey dominate the front page of CNN.com, while the Iranian president's debate challenge to President Bush gets pushed to the side).

But YouTube at least provides a way for people to make their message available, after which it can be checked out by others. That's what happened in this case, as the lead Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee in the House has asked for more answers from the Coast Guard on De Kort's allegations.