bringing change - technological, that is - to the white house

N'Gai Croal, who so graciously took some great photos of the breadpig band during our SpikeTV shoot, recently interviewed me for a piece, All the President's Tweets, about how Obama ought to bring technology to the White House.

If there is a chance to really change WhiteHouse.gov, elder statesman Jeff Jarvis and I daydreamed about how technology could help the Obama administration better work for us, since we are after all, its boss.

[...] it's a sentiment echoed even more concretely by Ohanian. "Lots of data comes out of government; we don't all want to have to slog through it, but computers can," he says. "So if they can make that data available in accessible formats—data that belongs to us as taxpaying citizens—that could be great." He cites "Web 2.0 mashups," like Google Maps with housing values or crime statistics overlaid on them, as an example of the kinds of creative ways that government-assembled data could be reused if provided in XML (extensible markup language) formats, which define the content of a document separately from its formatting precisely so that it can be repurposed in other applications.

And if anyone from the White House is reading this, that means no more PDFs, whose contents aren't easily searched or extracted for further use. Says Ohanian: "PDFs are the bane of my existence—they aren't much more of a favor than having a printed document."

Fortunately, every indication we've gotten from the Obama team since they went online for his campaign is that they're absolutely capable and willing to get this kind of technological change done. The task they're facing, and all the obstacles in their way, are largely the result of legacy. It's a shame it has to be backwards-compatible. It's a pity we didn't have all this technology (or some incredible foresight) when the British burnt down the White House, as we could have rebuilt it with this kind of transparency in mind.

The kind that present technology facilitates with ease.

As for Ohanian, what he hopes to see after a four- or eight-year Obama presidency is for Whitehouse.gov to become a useful tool. "I've never had a reason to go to Whitehouse.gov before. So if it becomes a usable tool for citizens, that will be an accomplishment, because it means that the tech has been put to good use." That's a lot to place on a single URL. Let's hope that Obama & Co. are up to the task.

It's true, the closest I'd ever gotten to WhiteHouse.gov was when I'd trick friends into visiting WhiteHouse.com (formerly a NSFW site). I look forward to the day when the .gov is a regular destination.

obama barack'd new york

I've never been to political rally before, but Obama is just so damn charming that I had to attend his Washington Square Park event this past Thursday. I was not alone. I walked by people lined up for blocks way longer than when I waited for my Wii. To give you an idea of how packed it was (and how overwhelmed the planners were) here's the line to get through security. This was the view after about 30 minutes of waiting.And here's how far I got one hour later.Let that statue on the left indicate the progress I made after 60 intimate minutes with my fellow sweaty and tired line-waiters. Good thing I had Speaker for the Dead to read.

They eventually gave up on the security detail once Obama was about to take the stage. At this point, the crowd's attitude could be described as marginally rowdy. Once the gates came down, the mood quickly switched to rock-concert-euphoric as people young and old dashed through the checkpoint.And if that wasn't enough, here's the scene once Obama's intro music started (note: that is not me screaming).

This also happens to be the intro song Kucinich uses. He doesn't quite rock it as well.

Once Obama got on stage, you got the feeling he could have said anything and still gotten an ovation.

The rest of the rally went as expected. Obama is remarkably charismatic -- alarmingly so. And the response he got from the crowd (of at least 20,000 by my guesstimate) suggests that I wasn't the only one succumbing to his high CHA. Granted, I've never been any kind of a rally before, but there was an emotional response from this crowd that trumped the best rock concerts I've been to. Even Metallica.

I'm still not convinced, but if you're going to vote with your gut next November (assuming we still have elections, heh) this is the candidate who will not only say all the right things -- he'll say them so damn well.