Politics and Law

Fans of legalizing marijuana pushed their questions to the top of a WhiteHouse.gov voting system. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET)

As any major Web site can attest, any online voting begs to be influenced by special interests. CNBC yanked a 2007 presidential poll after enthusiastic Ron Paul supporters boosted their candidate to 75 percent, and the FreeRepublic.com crowd recently flooded a Web vote about stem cell funding.

On Thursday, WhiteHouse.gov became the latest Web site to experience this kind of deluge as part of an online town hall--and this time, it was marijuana legalization advocates who voted to push their questions to the top of the charts.

By the time President Obama's town hall began, questions about legalizing marijuana ranked at the top of the "green jobs," "financial stability," "jobs," and "budget" sections (and came in a close second place in the health care section too). Sample question: "What are your plans for the failing, 'War on Drugs', that's sucking money from tax payers and putting non-violent people in prison longer than the violent criminals?"

White House aides didn't choose any of those questions to present to the president on the nearby screens, but Obama did acknowledge that the topic was a popular one.

He said online voters wanted to know "whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation," and joked that "I don't know what this says about the online audience."

But the president--whose administration has indicated that it would effectively end raids on distributors of medical marijuana in California--said he would not support changing federal drug law that makes even possession of pot a crime. "No, I don't think this is a good strategy to grow our economy," Obama said, to applause from the audience.

The White House said that 92,927 people submitted 104,126 questions and cast a total of 3,606,824 votes.

Earlier in the week, some drug-related blogs had encouraged supporters to flood the virtual polls and vote for the marijuana-related questions through the version of Google Moderator that the White House chose for the town hall project. (Google uses the application internally, including for companywide meetings.)

A Marijuana.com discussion thread says: "Vote for the top marijuana related questions." NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said: "Please take a moment right now to log on the WhiteHouse.gov/OpenForQuestions and vote for the questions above, as well as others pertaining to the need to regulate cannabis. Let the President know that millions of American voters believe that the time has come to tax and regulate marijuana."

Obama's brief remarks on the topic demonstrated a weakness of the online town hall format: it doesn't allow followup questions, which journalists used during the president's press conference earlier this week to good effect. If that were possible, drug war foes would likely have had something else to say.

Oh, and during Thursday's online town hall, the president did address topics other than marijuana and federal drug laws, including unemployment and job creation.

Fans of President Barack Obama, or perhaps just those who dislike former President George W. Bush, seem to think there's something notable about the way the new White House Web site is configured to deal with search engines.

That configuration file is called robots.txt. It's designed to let Webmasters ask search engine robots not to include certain areas of a Web site in their index. Well-behaved robots will comply.

The Obama revamp of Whitehouse.gov included a shorter robots.txt file, which Thenextweb.com called "a sign of greater transparency and change." A BoingBoing poster claimed that now "people can find information that was restricted before." And so on.

There's just one problem with these comments. They're wrong. As of Tuesday morning, the Bush administration's robots.txt file did only two things: first, it pointed search engines to the high-graphics versions of the page, as opposed to the text-only versions, and second, it tried to keep type-in-your-search-query pages from being indexed.

Those are legitimate reasons to list those pages in robots.txt, which is why CNET's own file is relatively long and complicated too. (Sites that have been around for eight years or longer tend to get that way). We ask search engines not to index an "/Ads" directory, e-mail-this-story pages, and dozens of others. The Democrat-controlled House and Senate have--gasp!--substantial robots.txt files too.

It's true that in 2007, the Bush White House did block some files they should not have, which they fixed once I brought it to their attention. They also fixed a more serious problem with the Director of National Intelligence's Web site, and an earlier problem in 2003. (A better solution would be for search engines to ignore overly broad robots.txt files on .gov and .mil sites, including Thomas.loc.gov.)

If anything, Obama's robots.txt file is too short. It doesn't currently block search pages, meaning they'll show up on search engines--something that most site operators don't want and which runs afoul of Google's Webmaster guidelines. Those guidelines say: "Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines."

And here's something sure to upset Obama-praising geeks: the new White House site doesn't pass the litmus test of good HTML design. Alas, according to the W3C, not all pages successfully validate. Those are your tax dollars at work.

P.S.: The White House seems to be using Akamai's Edge Platform for scalable Web hosting:

sh-2.05b$ host whitehouse.gov
whitehouse.gov has address 96.6.250.135
whitehouse.gov mail is handled by 105 mailhub-wh3.whitehouse.gov.
whitehouse.gov mail is handled by 100 mailhub-wh2.whitehouse.gov.
sh-2.05b$ host www.whitehouse.gov
www.whitehouse.gov is an alias for www.whitehouse.gov.edgekey.net.

www.whitehouse.gov.edgekey.net is an alias for e2561.b.akamaiedge.net.
e2561.b.akamaiedge.net has address 96.16.218.135
sh-2.05b$ 

Caption: The most prominent feature of President Obama's new Whitehouse.gov site: a promise that change has come to America, and an oversize photo of Obama. On left, the outgoing Bush administration's site as of Tuesday morning.

As President-elect Barack Obama began his inaugural address at noon on Tuesday, his aides were busy switching over Whitehouse.gov.

Until 11:59 am EST, the Web site featured a photograph of former president George W. Bush leaving the White House for the last time. The relaunched site's most prominent feature is an oversize photo of the new president next to the slogan: "Change has come to America."

Because the presidential Web site launched under Bill Clinton's tenure, this is only the second time that Whitehouse.gov has changed hands. The Clinton-Bush handover was not without problems: The site on January 20, 2001, briefly sported the line "Insert Something Meaningful Here," and suffered from some broken links and 404 errors.

Obama's new site, too, has its bugs. The site administrators posted an entry saying Obama "was sworn in" before that happened; another post titled "Read the Inaugural Address" was blank an hour after Obama finished giving it; some photo captions were incorrect; and the search option didn't work reliably.

If you're interested in reading the inaugural address, our CBSNews.com sister site has posted the full text.

The White House also now has what it calls a blog, something that Bush didn't have, except for occasional features like his "Trip Notes" during an overseas visit. Macon Phillips, the White House's director of new media and one of the blog contributors, said in a post that "Whitehouse.gov is just the beginning of the new administration's efforts to expand and deepen this online engagement" in making this the most "open and transparent" administration in history. Phillips also asks for comments from the public through a Web form.

At least in its initial incarnation, the White House blog seems to be more a collection of press releases (a proclamation of a day of reconciliation) and Obama statements (remarks at a speech on Monday, and Tuesday's inaugural address). There is no opportunity to comment, the person posting the item is not automatically identified, and it doesn't include "trackbacks," meaning ways to identify who else is talking about the entry.

On technology policy, the new administration promises to support Net neutrality, encourage the development of Internet-filtering technologies for parents "while preserving the First Amendment," and "strengthen privacy protections for the Digital Age." In an echo of Obama's campaign Web site, it says intellectual-property owners should be "fairly treated," while copyright and patent laws should be updated.

The White House lists names of appointees for Cabinet positions, including well-known ones like Hillary Clinton for secretary of state and lesser-known ones like Robert Nabors for deputy budget director. But it missed the opportunity to post photos and even brief biographies of each of the nominees.

It does feature a reasonably flattering official biography of the outgoing President Bush, saying he worked "to create an ownership society and build a future of security, prosperity, and opportunity for all Americans. He signed into law tax relief that helped workers keep more of their hard-earned money" and took steps "to protect our homeland and create a world free from terror."

Elsewhere, though, another Web page lambastes Bush's "unconscionable ineptitude" in responding to Hurricane Katrina and promises that such a "catastrophic failure" will never happen again.