Obama 2.0 [1]
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton [2] on
The election of Barack Obama [3] as America's next president has prompted a number of analyses [4] of what has been described as "one of the most effective presidential campaigns [5] that's ever been run." Now the Obama team is showing that it intends to use some of the same new internet technologies that made it "kind of the Google of politics [6]" to reinvent the way the White House communicates with the public. The presidential inauguration committee has launched "a campaign-style social networking [7] web site, pic2009.org [8]." They've created another website, change.gov [9], to communicate with the public during the transition period until Obama takes office. And as Micah Sifry noted on Wednesday, change.gov is starting to "go interactive, intensively [10]. ... A few hours ago, the Change.gov blog led with a post called 'Join the Discussion' and pointed readers to a video from two members of the health care transition team," which invites readers to "join the discussion [11]" with suggestions for how the healthcare system should be changed. Already the forum has attracted thousands of comments. "Imagine what happens if those numbers -- on not just any 'centralized site' but the one that symbolically and perhaps literally has the attention of the President-elect -- start climbing into the five- and six-digits," Sifry writes. "Before our eyes, we are witnessing the beginning of a rebooting of the American political system."