presidential

Obama to deliver weekly address via YouTube

For the first time ever, the president's weekly address to the nation will be delivered via video as well as radio.

President-elect Barack Obama, the Washington Post reported, will begin by taping this week's Democratic address at his transition office in Chicago on Friday, and the video will be posted on Saturday to Obama's transition site, Change.gov, via YouTube. Other members of the Obama administration will post online videos as well.

On Thursday evening, Obama's transition team co-chair Valerie Jarrett posted a YouTube video, shown below, to the site explaining the lobbying restrictions for Obama'… Read more

eBay halts inauguration ticket sales

eBay has removed tickets for the upcoming presidential inauguration from its Web sites in an effort to help curb scams.

Tickets to the January 20 event have been listed on eBay and sites like StubHub, an eBay subsidiary, for tens of thousands of dollars. The home page of InauguralTickets.com reads, "Our prices reflect the difficulty in obtaining hard-to-find, quality tickets."

eBay decided to halt the ticket sales on Thursday after meeting this week with the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, the Los Angeles Times reported.

"Any Web site or ticket broker claiming that they have … Read more

More tech executives join Obama transition team

More members of President-elect Barack Obama's transition team were named Wednesday, including some veterans of the technology and communications sectors.

The transition team announced its agency review teams Wednesday, groups of advisers who will review key federal departments, agencies, and commissions, as well as the White House, to aide Obama, Vice President-elect Joe Biden, and key advisers in their policy, personnel, and budget decisions.

"The Teams will ensure that senior appointees have the information necessary to complete the confirmation process, lead their departments, and begin implementing signature policy initiatives immediately after they are sworn in," according to … Read more

Agendas vanish from Obama's transition Web site

Last week, President-elect Barack Obama launched a Web site with detailed information about his plans for technology, Iraq, and health care policies.

Now they're gone.

The "agenda" Web pages on Change.gov seem to have mysteriously disappeared on Sunday. By Monday morning, they were replaced with a vague statement saying that Obama and running mate Joe Biden have a "comprehensive and detailed agenda" that will "bring about the kind of change America needs," with the individual pages deleted entirely.

A version of the now-deleted homeland security agenda recovered from the cache feature of … Read more

Government transition sites launched

Two new Web sites launched Wednesday that map out President-elect Barack Obama's transition to the White House.

Change.gov, Obama's official transition site, features a blog, a section with Obama's agenda, and a section that profiles the Obama administration. It also includes a jobs page for those interested in working in the Obama administration, a page titled "America Serves" that emphasizes the need for community service, and a section called "American Moment," where visitors are encouraged to share their stories or their vision for the country.

The front page on Wednesday linked to … Read more

Obama's search for a CTO

By naming some technology executives to his transition team--especially former IAC executive Julius Genachowski--President-elect Barack Obama is signaling that he's likely to follow through with his proposal to appoint a chief technology officer to the White House.

The person in this new position--and possibly a new White House technology office staff--could be given the directive to create new levels of transparency and access to government agencies, or to guide policies that spur innovation and growth. Technology experts within the Beltway warn, however, that a CTO would have to avoid potential pitfalls such as creating new spending for ineffectual projects, … Read more

Obama names tech execs to transition team

President-elect Barack Obama has named tech executives from Google.org and InterActiveCorp to his transition team, according to reports.

Google.org's Sonal Shah, and Julius Genachowski, a former IAC executive who also served as chief counsel to former Democratic FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, have both been named to the team, according to news reports.

Genachowski is a co-founder and managing director of Rock Creek Ventures, and is a founding partner of LaunchBox Digital, an early-stage investment firm based in Washington, D.C.

He attended law school with Obama, and helped stress the importance of high-tech issues in the campaign, … Read more

Add election results into Firefox with RSS Ticker

Yesterday, Jessica Dolcourt provided four great applications for tracking U.S. election results online. I wanted to quickly follow up with a short word about my favorite RSS ticker tool, the simply named Mozilla Firefox add-on RSS Ticker, currently at version 2.0.3.

If you want to work, chat, watch videos, listen to music, or do any other fun Internet stuff instead of tracking election results constantly on news sites, RSS Ticker provides a nifty way of keeping up with breaking election news via a nonintrusive ticker that runs across the bottom of Firefox's interface, below your status … Read more

Cell phones make life tough for pollsters

While I normally leave the politics writing to others, this Wall Street Journal story caught my eye.

Sure, I was sucked in by the main story about how some polls show the presidential race as much closer than others. But what really captured my attention was the technology issue that was behind some of that variance.

Historically, pollsters have dialed random house phones to get their selection of voters. The problem is that more and more people, particularly young adults, don't have a landline.

The difference can be significant, as pointed out by a Pew research study last month. … Read more