Three minutes isn't nearly long enough to talk about the rune data type in Go, but I tried anyway.

Here are some good resources related to character encoding and memory allocation:

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) by Joel Spolsky
• Strings, bytes, runes and characters in Go
• Rune literals in the Go spec

Things I didn't cover:

• Why does byte alias an unsigned integer (uint8), but rune aliases a signed integer (int32)? Turns out if you ask that in the Go Google Group, they get a bit annoyed.

Edit

At about 2:10, I say, When it gets more complicated is when you need to represent multi-characters [sic]. I misspoke, and meant to say multibyte characters.