No embedding? No comments? The Royal Family on YouTube.

The Royal Family has a YouTube channel now — here's the BBC report — but it's really not much fun at all. Too controlling. I can understand keeping us from messing up your site with comments, but embedding is key. I want to mess up my own site with your video, but you'll have to relinquish some control.

I did watch Queen Elizabeth's first TV Christmas message from 1957, and fortunately there's a link to the transcript, so I can quote something (and correct a bad typo):

Twenty-five years ago my grandfather broadcast the first of these Christmas messages. Today is another landmark because television has made it possible for many of you to see me in your homes on Christmas Day. My own family often gather round to watch television as they are this moment, and that is how I imagine you now....

That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us. Because of these changes I am not surprised that many people feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard. How to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old.

But it is not the new inventions which are the difficulty. The trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery.

They would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless, [honesty] counted as foolishness and self-interest set up in place of self-restraint.

So even as YouTube is now new, television was once new. And just as television was part of a world that tempted people to throw out religion and live a life of meaningless immorality, we've got the internet making us feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard. We're still worrying about whether we're throwing out all religion and morality, and it's got to be a little heartening to see the Queen wringing her hands about it 50 years ago.