RSSNo time wasted for change to Whitehouse.gov
By Angela Gunn | Published January 20, 2009, 3:31 PM
While President Obama and several million of his fellow Americans were shivering on the National Mall this morning, Macon Phillips and his team were swapping out files and posting the all-new whitehouse.gov.
Phillips is the Director of New Media for the White House and had the signal honor of f1srt p0st!!!1 on the new White House blog.
Phillips reiterates several of the promises previously made by the new Administration concerning community, transparency and participation, including the vow to publish all non-emergency legislation to the web site for five days, so the public can read and comment before the President signs (or vetoes) it. The text of the proclamation of today's National Day Of Renewal and Reconciliation, which Obama signed moments after taking the Oath of Office, is also available for scrutiny.
Elsewhere on the site, visitors are promised reports from the press pool, video and slide shows from events, and texts of proclamations, executive orders, and the like -- as well as the new Administration's technology policy, which lists as its first bullet point support for "the principle of network neutrality."
The transition, which was largely accomplished by the end of President Obama's inaugural speech, was smooth and even smart. The ThreatChaos blog notes that the new site no longer allows one to interact with the content management system directly, as one could at change.gov. More change was made evident by kottke.org's comparison of the site's robots.txt files from yesterday (rather lengthy) and today (two lines). Sites use the robots.txt file to shoo search engines away from things the site's keeper does not wish to be seen.
Obama fought hard to keep his ever-present BlackBerry. Obama worried that without his beloved BlackBerry he would lose touch with friends outside of Washington. A super encryption package has been created just for his BlackBerry. Obama is the president of new era and will move us forward with new technology.
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|I think everyone missed the point of this story. It's about how fast they are moving to change things over. I hope the government focus on more IT issues. We should be a head of the world as far as IT/Business/Science, etc. I hope Obama being younger will take us there...as for him being the anointed one...please get over it. He is special, because he is the first person of color to win the presidency. The party is over and it's time to work. He has four years to get me to vote for him again. I hope his administration does good work, if not I will get to look at the other guy or gal that's running against him.
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|I'll quote ladylust below:
"Its always changed that fast...... "
The only difference is that people are actually watching this time.
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|Actually he only has 18 months. If he doesn't have the economy turned around by then the republicans will take Congress back and he will become a lame duck president.
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|They've always had that....the only difference is that this time people are actually paying attention. As though it's some big deal or something. ;)
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|The thing about robots.txt is that they might deter honest search engines, but to a human they offer the potential to find some interesting areas.
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|Its always changed that fast...... Oh wait this is the anointed and holy one we are talking about....
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|Bingo.
Much as I disagree with the guy, though, I have to admit; This country needs patriotism right now and he seems to be quite good at firing it up in that department.
We'll see how that pans out when things simmer down, but if bringing back a sense of patriotism is *all* this guy accomplishes in office, I will be happy.
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|I personally liked the look of the old site better. I think they should have a section that shows what the site has looked like throughout it's***ory. The way back machine didn't work too well on the site that was there yesterday. It missed a CSS file so it's messed up.
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|By the way, everyone: I found this out a bit late, but I can tell you now that the White House is now Twittering too: http://twitter.com/whitehouse_gov . Their follow list is fun: Obama's own feed, Biden's own feed, the Senate floor, a few others... and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Rock that bipartisanship, y'all!
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|I don't think they should be using things like twitter or youtube. How long do you think it's going to take for one of these companies to say their site is endorsed by the President of the United States? Now if Obama wanted to hire Google to make something for whitehouse.gov that's one thing, but for them to pick youtube over vimeo or whatever else just isn't right.
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|Funny you mention YouTube, LVThunder -- Google and the GSA are in discussions right now about how to adjust the services Terms of Service to meet federal standards for posting material. That conversation has been going on for a while and I understand it's mainly down to a jurisdiction question.
As for the endorsement thing, I certainly see your point. OTOH, I think you've got to go where the people are; in theory they could offer a homegrown Twitter-like broadcast service, but that would require a lot of resources to both build the service and get the word out. I am not aware that there has been any deal made to keep these companies from claiming some sort of endorsement, but it sure wouldn't surprise me. I might just check into that, once I get done cussing about this Heartland data mega-breach...
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|The whitehouse_gov feed is not official by any means, just some Obamafans who set up an autofeed to track the RSS feed from change.gov until that was transitioned to whitehouse.gov.
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|Good to see some much needed "change" to the uninspiring Whitehouse.gov website.
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|I'm impressed that someone either took a look at the old robots.txt and decided "no, not this time," or took *no* look and simply defaulted to the usability-friendly choice. We pay for the site; it really should be as easy to navigate as possible, and that includes a nice search.
I do however reserve the right to complain about the whole shootin' match if any significant portion of the site is given over to the family pet(s). Call me boring, but that sort of thing should be a very minor portion of what the official site offers. (Or, you know, maybe I'm just not a dog person!)
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|oh cry me a river people.
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|We all have to sacrifice to help pay for Obama's $160 million dollar inaugural party and his new web page. Your tax dollars going for a good cause. . . .
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|It's the first part of a bailout for the inauguration crash of 2009.
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|less change in my pocket?
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