online technology and the white house - together at last!

A little while ago, I had a nice phone interview with the National Journal about the role of technology within the Obama White House. My synthesized thoughts follow those of Lawrence Lessig, a humbling position indeed.

Alexis Ohanian is one of the founders of the popular site Reddit.com, which launched in 2005 and is used by thousands to rank which news stories appear on the site's home page. Based on what he's seen with Reddit, he said, most Americans won't bother going to a site to rank projects to fund, and of those people who do visit, most won't contribute a vote. What will remain, he hopes, are people who consider themselves informed enough to cast a vote. For his part, Ohanian takes transparency a step further, dreaming of a day when the Internal Revenue Service lets Americans log in to see how their individual tax dollars are being spent and then lets them redirect their money.

Reading it this way, I felt compelled to clarify what appears to be a rather bleak forecast for participation.

Based on what he's seen with Reddit, he said, most Americans won't bother going to a site to rank projects to fund, and of those people who do visit, most won't contribute a vote.

My belief that most Americans wouldn't bother going is a combination of apathy (something I believe these technologies would ameliorate) and that the majority of reddit traffic is not logged in -- and thus non-voting.

That said, the motivations for visiting reddit.com and this policy site are quite different. The majority of redditors just want to be informed or entertained and needn't affect the rankings. Whereas I'd envision a significant portion of traffic to this site would be visitors arriving to make an impact. And you can be sure a number will be driven by email blasts from interest groups.

Ultimately, the more transparency that can be brought to the process, the better. Lessig is right to point out that replacing the decision-making process with ill-informed citizens would have a negative impact. But this technology can be just the thing to make citizens better informed about their government. If we can get up to the minute stock quotes and news about Apple, we ought to demand (and get) the same from our representatives.

After all, we're paying for them -- let's get our money's worth.

an interview with tivate, with penguin-based inspiration!

I took an unacceptably long amount of time to get back to Justin Hernandez of tivate with my A to his Q, but our email convo is now online. (Even despite my tardiness, he generously offered me beer on my next trip to Hawaii!) Apparently there's an alien social revolution going on.

Hmm, I guess I had it coming. When you're done finding inspiration from a penguin, the Rob Malda interview is certainly worth a look.

interviewed by wired's marketing guy

Conflict of interest? Of course not.

Last week, Jim Hopkinson sat down with me for his podcast, The Hopkinson Report (download and listen) and we chatted about reddit: its history, community, and the redesign.

Chris joined us for the second half of the podcast (coming on Wednesday) and even confesses the secret to beating the reddit hotness algorithm.

Oh, and there's some thought-provoking Mister Splashy Pants discussion in part II as well. Did you know he has his own Wikipedia page? That's one hell of a whale...

redditAll.com traffic takes down MentalFloss.com

That's a bald-faced lie. But hopefully they'll get the site back online and you can read that stirring interview I promised. If you just can't wait, Here's the GoogleCache of it.

Then you should buy one of their t-shirts so they can afford some new servers.

mental floss asks the questions you've always wanted me to answer

David over at Mental Floss interviewed me via email last week and the results are on the Creatively Speaking blog ahead of schedule. I knew all those bribes would finally pay off.

Take a 5 minute vacation and find out my answers to these questions and more!

I guess i should lead with the absolute most important question–the one on every reader’s mind: what’s the deal with the little reddit cartoon character? Is there a story behind him/her/it? A name? A history worth sharing?

If you could have lunch with any dead person from history, who would it be and why? And it better not be the alien dude.

Oh, and I even got the chance to plug breadpig. Hurray. If you like breadpig tees (or even if you hate them), you'll love the tees over at Mental Floss. Don't miss the Lady Macbeth hand soap tee -- just don't wear it to bed.