Barack Obama will be the most shadowed president in history, and it won't be just the Secret Service and press corps surrounding him.
Citizens and paparazzi armed with camera phones and a variety of other multimedia devices will chronicle every movement he makes in public and post it online.
President-elect Obama visits a Chicago deli to pick up some corned beef sandwiches. According to various reports, Obama and troop arrived at Manny's Cafeteria and Deli at 12:29 p.m. and walked out at 12:45 p.m. with two cherry pies and three corned beef sandwiches, paying $48.34 in cash.
(Credit: Change.gov)Obama's visit on Friday afternoon to Manny's Cafeteria and Deli in Chicago was treated as a major event. Some footage was recorded by the Associated Press (see below), and in the background you can see employees, as well as a horde of press members, pointing their cameras at Obama. With half the planet in possession of increasingly capable camera phones, Obama's life will fill enormous disk space in the cloud.
Politico is also keeping track of Obama's daily life with its "44" blog, documenting the president-elect's movements and important announcements during the transition to the White House. The forthcoming Obama White House will be treated like a reality TV show or West Wing, broadcast 24x7 on the Internet.
(Credit:
Politico 44)
Other presidents, including George W. Bush, have been similarly tracked online, but the Obama presidency brings a more finely tuned understanding to this phenomenon. Obama's pre-inauguration site, Change.gov, is providing its own play-by-play of Obama's activities, including briefly detailing the deli visit with a photo slideshow.
Posting its own version of events is a way for the Obama team to gain some control over the chaos and messaging in the midst of the incessant Obama lifestreaming that will occur over the next four or eight years. The disciplined, focused, and modulated Obama has already had a lot of practice on a big stage. Now the spotlight is all on him. Every gesture and word from Obama accessible to the public will be recorded and posted online, from a multitude of sources and points of views. His lifestream will be endlessly scrutinized and measured for meaning.
The Obama office of communications will be very busy building on the lessons learned from the campaign. Obama will likely hold more press conferences than his predecessor, but his team will continue its use of the Internet to directly reach the American people, as in Obama's weekly radio address, which is also a Web TV show that reached nearly 900,000 YouTube viewers with the November 14 edition.
Dan Manatt of PoliticsTV offers some useful suggestions--such as making the U.S. budget comprehensible to mere mortals--to the Obama communications team in a blog post on TechPresident.com:
The president's budget should become a multimedia document that makes the numbers--and the policy questions--accessible to the average citizen. The budget should be released online--not just as a pdf, as it is now, but as a multimedia, dynamic document with Web apps, widgets, and appendices applying Quicken-style functionalities, dynamic charts, etc. That way Americans can visualize and understand where their $3 trillion in tax dollars (minus the $1 trillion deficit) goes to. (Perhaps not surprisingly, private sites, including Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget, offer citizens better digital tools to understand the budget than the White House and the OMB, http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/).
Given the lack of confidence in the economy and the measures taken by the current administration, as well as Congress, providing more transparency into the budget process and bailouts would be helpful to the national psyche. You can expect Obama to use his online TV channel to further change the course of history.
Updated at 11 a.m. to clarify that the change.gov site with the YouTube video of the Obama's radio address has text links to the same video on AOL, MSN, and Yahoo. YouTube still has premier position as the secretary of video...
It's great that President-elect Barack Obama is delivering his regularly scheduled Saturday address in both audio and video form. After using the Internet to help him get elected and connect with younger voters, it's clear that his team will continue to exploit the media to deliver its messages and stimulate dialog.
Obama has chosen to upload the video of his Saturday address to Google's YouTube, by far the most dominant video-sharing service, and embed the video on his Change.gov transition site.
The video has already garnered more than 500,000 views, and this is just the beginning of the Obama's administration's use of video. Post-inauguration, there will likely be a White House YouTube channel to push the administration's agenda and to hopefully to provide more transparency.
My question is why favor YouTube? It's obvious that YouTube is the way to reach the most people. According to Nielsen Online's VideoCensus, Google's service served 5.35 billion video streams in September 2008. Yahoo, the closest competitor, had 264 million.
But why should the incoming president, or public official, favor one Internet video service over another? Yahoo, MSN, Blip, Veoh, and other video-sharing sites shouldn't have to lobby the White House for equal time or at least some time. I am sure the choice of YouTube was practical, and has nothing to do with Google CEO Eric Schmidt's very public support of Obama.
Implicit product endorsements are difficult to avoid for any public official. If Obama prefers a BlackBerry, Apple can't do much to fix that problem. But, Obama is rarely seen in pictures with his Blackberry and The New York Times reports that he is going to have to give up his favorite communications device.
In the case of uploading video, the Obama team can create its own branded, video-sharing service neutral video player that allows anyone in the world to embed the content. That might be a more equitable way for Obama to spread his message, and he could still have a YouTube channel.
(Credit:
change.gov)
On this week's EIC Squared podcast, ZDNet's Larry Dignan and I talk about the tanking economy, the challenges facing an Obama administration CTO, and Microsoft's search quests with Verizon Wireless and Yahoo.
The holiday shopping season is looking grim as Circuit City files for bankruptcy and Best Buy lowers its forecast for its fiscal year. When will it ever end?
President-elect Obama has called for a national CTO. Given the complexity of technology infrastructure, the abundance of projects, the squeeze on budgets, and policy controversies, this will be an extremely challenging position.
We also discuss Microsoft's next moves to increase its share of the search market, with Verizon Wireless or Yahoo, or both.
ObamaCTO.org provides a forum for defining, ranking and discussing the key tech priorities for the nation.
While the technology pundits are debating the role of an Obama administration CTO, a few programmers in Seattle yesterday decided to do something more useful. Using an application from UserVoice, they launched ObamaCTO.org, a site, unaffiliated with the Obama machine, that allow citizens to list and vote on what should be the top tech priorities for the new administration.
"User voting is an easy way for people to prioritize ideas," said Matt Lerner of Frontseat.org, which created the site. While the voting on this site is more like on Digg than a scientific sampling, and can be gamed, it is part of the Internet-fueled movement to give more of voice to the populace. The Obama campaign provided ample evidence of the benefits of using the Web for massive outreach. Now the question is how much weight the wisdom of the crowd will carry in influencing the direction of government policy.
Lerner and his co-workers are focused on making use of public data for civic good. "We have been interested in all the government data that is available," he said. "There is a treasure trove, such as data on campaign finance and voting records, but it is not standardized or structured, and doesn't have any APIs. Many innovations would be created if the data were available to programmers."
He gave a few examples of applications built around government data. Voting records are publicly available but must be accessed from each county in the U.S. and then normalized. "You could have maps of a block and see who hasn't registered to vote as a way to get out the vote," Lerner explained. Voter data is available from private firms such as Catalyst Consulting, Lerner said, but is expensive.
With census data on whether people drive, walk, or take public transportation to work, activists could encourage people to be more environmentally responsible. Frontseat.org developed Walk Score, which ranks the "walkability" of 2,508 neighborhoods in the largest 40 U.S. cities.
Walk Score rates thousands of neighborhoods and ranks them on how walkable they are.
See also: Micah Sifry--Obama's CTO: Never Mind Who; What Should S/he Do?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt is out of the running for the chief technology officer (CTO) position that the Obama administration is planning to create. In an interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer, Schmidt said, "I love working at Google and I'm very happy to stay at Google, so the answer is no." Schmidt will remain a close adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, but his first call to duty is Google.
Based on the job description below, it could be difficult to find a worthy candidate from the private sector willing to take on a task of such enormous scope in an environment known to chew up and spit out White House policy czars.
Obama will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.
The Obama administration's CTO job could be one of those bureaucratic positions that ends up consumed by turf wars rather than making real progress against initiatives. CNET News' Stephanie Condon noted the overlaps, which could turn into conflicts, between a White House CTO and CTOs working in various agencies:
The jurisdiction of a CTO could overlap with other agencies or executive positions in areas such as innovation policy, cybersecurity, or intellectual property enforcement. To avoid those overlaps, the Obama team will have to decide, for instance, whether the CTO would focus on goals like making agencies more efficient or take on a broader agenda such as dictating policy.
Just creating and implementing a coherent technology plan and policy for the numerous agencies under the Department of Homeland Security is an incredibly daunting task for a CTO. The DHS Directorate of Science and Technology, for example, has a budget of $830 million. It has 250 projects in process and 50 percent of them are expected to fail, according to Jay Cohen, Under Secretary for Science and Technology for the DHS.
The Department of Homeland Security organizational chart. The DHS is trying to achieve information flow across 87,000 different federal, state, and local governmental jurisdictions.
(Credit: Department of Homeland Security)The Obama administration has a long list of tech initiatives (see below). The focus should be on having the best technical minds and management working on each initiative--the White House CTO as chief tech policy evangelist, inter-agency liaison and human capital recruiter.
Speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit, HP CTO Shane Robison, who has been touted as a White House CTO candidate, believes that a White House CTO would need to focus on a few key tech initiatives and not just serve as an administrator or liaison between CTOs across the government.
This approach to the White House CTO job makes the most sense in terms of being able to accomplish specific objectives. In addition, Obama is fielding his own technology council of private and public sector titans, as his predecessor did with his President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), to advise and help out on key issues.
(Credit:
CBS News)
As the rookie U.S. senator who was catapulted into the White House on the back of the Internet, Obama knows that technology is a key enabler for his President 2.0 administration. He keeps a BlackBerry or iPhone on a holster on his hip, although his campaign Flickr photo library appears to devoid of pictures of Obama using his smartphone. (It must not yet be considered appropriate to show the president-elect text messaging.)
The technology to accomplish his long list of goals exists, but the funding, expertise, focus and political will is lacking in many areas. Transforming the U.S. government technology infrastructure from a plodding battleship (outside of the NSA and a few other high-tech agencies) into a speedy, adaptable ship built for the Internet age isn't going to be solved in the Obama era. But great progress can be made if the White House CTO can recruit into agencies the kind of people who helped Obama transform the way electoral campaigns are run and stimulate young people to study science curriculums.
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