Just back from drinking mimosa’s and celebrating the inaugural festivities, I checked in on the new White House Web site. TechPresident reports that the handover happened precisely on time, at 12:01 pm eastern; pretty cool that the Web operation mirrors the transfer of power tradition online. As Obama’s online folks had told me back in December, there’s basically no radical change to the site on day one. No wikis, no social network, and in fact not yet the same participation engines built for Change.gov. The only feedback area I can find is a standard a 500-character contact form. There is, however, a prominently featured blog announcing the new site and reiterating the pledges for transparency and participation. No doubt they’ll be rolling more of that out in the coming weeks. But it’s worth keeping in mind that Obama’s Web operation was estimated to have somewhere between a dozen and 30 people involved in it. David Almacy, who formerly headed up Bush’s online efforts, told me that they managed WhiteHouse.gov with a staff of…six.
Meanwhile, Change.gov is now frozen but still up; it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it, if anything. And if the transition team carried out the promise made on their “Citizen’s Briefing Book” segment, Obama at this very moment has a notebook on his desk revealing the nation’s top priority, according to the online crowd’s wisdom: “ending marijuana prohibition.” Somehow I’m guessing the answer is…no we can’t.
UPDATE: I should have noted that the first blog post on Whitehouse.gov is authored by Macon Phillips, I quoted in the Wired story and who was one of the savviest people I spoke with. It bodes well for the White House Web operation that he stayed on. Several of the biggest names from the campaign’s Web side returned to the private sector.
UPDATE 2: Some blog reaction: PC World notes the changes and the lack of avenues for participation, and points out that the Bush transition team flubbed their own digital transition in 2001. Tim O’Reilly, not surprisingly, trumpets the site as the culmination of a victory for “Web 2.0 principles” — although it’s unclear how those principles are actually reflected in the site. Kottke observes the Obama team’s more parsimonious coding. Valleywag gets all clever with a they-say-they-for-participation-but-look-no-comments-allowed joke. (In other news: Valleywag still exists! Who knew.) And much more.
Posted at 1:03 pm | Filed under Politics, Technology, Wired |
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