Dude, have you seen the latest Kaine video?

He's got his own channel on YouTube, dude.

And now, you too can go to www.youtube.com/vagovernor and see videos from Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine on must-click topics like energy conservation, the "Martinsville Town Hall" and "National Employee Health and Fitness Day."

Kaine's office is the latest Virginia government entity to make the cyber hook-up via the state's official channel on YouTube, www.youtube.com/virginiagovernment.

Two dozen other government bodies are also tubing it. Among them: the counties of Roanoke and Fairfax; the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech, and state agencies like the departments of Emergency Management and Game and Inland Fisheries, which sports a popular "shad cam" that provides images of the latest migration of the state's founding fish.

There's nothing fishy about Kaine TV. The commonwealth does not allow any "friends" to post videos on the channel, so you won't see Paris Hilton or "Trunk Monkey." But a perusal of the site yesterday produced a Google-generated list of "related videos" that included a link to the video of a scantily-clad Playboy Playmate.

Yesterday afternoon, state officials said there was a problem with the filter that Google uses to screen the videos that it culls from the Internet to post in the "related" category, and a short time later, the playmate -- and her 230,000-plus hits from viewings on other sites -- disappeared.

Last year, Virginia, California, Utah and Arizona entered into a partnership with Google, which provided the technology to make information on the state Web sites easier to access and search. Virginia was one of the first states to launch a YouTube channel, and this year began adding agencies and their videos to its space on the World Wide Web. Kaine's YouTube channel officially launched yesterday with six videos.

"Our goal is to provide full citizen access to Virginia government through every possible means," Aneesh Chopra, Kaine's secretary of technology, said in a statement.

"Not everyone gets to hear directly from their governor about priorities, challenges and solutions," to issues in the state, Chopra said. "We're essentially creating a town hall meeting for the commonwealth."
Contact Jim Nolan at (804) 649-6061 or jnolan@timesdispatch.com.