Okay, so we gave Verizon a little bit of grief for their whole "us too" advertising campaign--a vain attempt to siphon off a small piece of the absurd buzz building around the iPhone. This attempt seems a bit more genuine, however.

As LG recently demonstrated, the iPhone got a lot of people thinking about the connection between YouTube and the mobile phone space. Verizon is taking things in the opposite direction however, making their users the "first in the nation that can record video with their wireless phones and upload the videos directly to YouTube."

Verizon users can upload camera phone videos directly from their mobile device to Youtube, using the text code YTUBE (98823). The videos will appear on the site in a matter of minutes. Pretty neat, and exactly what the Internet needed: a new influx of grainy amateur video. In cases like the London bombings, where bystanders captured a lot of footage on their phones, this could prove another avenue for the ever-increasing representation of citizen journalism.

At the same time, perhaps having that extra step between your phone's video and the Internet may not be such a bad thing--having to sit down at a PC to upload a video wasn't necessarily a bad buffer. It was a bit like the Web video equivalent to the Brady Bill's five day waiting period. Now that video can be uploaded instantly, can drunk YouTubing be too far behind?