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Bush White House Web Site Archive
The George W. Bush Presidential Library web site has what they describe as a '"snapshot" of the Whitehouse.gov web site [of the George W. Bush administration]. This is historical material, "frozen in time." The web site is no longer updated and links to external web sites and some internal pages will not work.'
The Bush Record page has the publications A Charge Kept: The Record of the Bush Presidency 2001–2009 and Highlights of Accomplishments and Results of the Administration of George W. Bush and 100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record. Continue readingOpen formats
Over at the Open House Project mailing list there has been a long discussion recently of how to make sure we have long-term, open, free, public access to Congressional and Presidential videos. (See also: Congress on YouTube and Should Obama ditch YouTube?) Today, Clay Shirky posted a clear and concise and persuasive summary of why we need open formats. (Re: Open video, Clay Shirky, Jan. 28, 2009.)
I was the head of the technical work on the Library of Congress's digitial preservation network (NDIIPP) in the early part of the decade, and when we undertook a survey of threats to long-term preservation of digital material, we assumed, dumb bunnies that we were, that we were dealing with issues of storage, redundancy and migration costs. It turned out, though, that the biggest threat to long-term preservation isn't hardware or cost, it's format; proprietary formats don't just happen to hamper unexpected future uses, that's what they are _designed_ to do. If you had an ASCII file and a WordStar file, both from 1987, and had to open and read each one as quickly as you could, what would the difference in elapsed seconds be? There has been some back and forth on this list about possible threats to putting USG-created materials into the hands of commercial entities. I'm on record as worrying about that precisely because path dependence on commercial motivation can easily come a cropper, and I recently had an experience that seemed to highlight that risk. Last Friday, I heard a talk at the Smithsonian from the awesome George Oates, who was instrumental in getting the Flickr Image Commons going. It was an inspiring talk, and when I went to introduce myself afterwards and we were talking about what might be next, she told me Yahoo had cut her job in the December round of layoffs. Of course. Why shouldn't Yahoo have done that -- the Commons may have been good PR for them in 2008, but its hard to argue that the cost is going to be recouped in revenues somehow. When we are talking about public goods, we are talking about goods that don't flourish in the commercial market *by definition.* We need to make that part of all the systemic thinking we do about open data; Ogg for video would be a great addition to the arsenal.There have been some excellent discussions going on over at the Open House Project Google Group lately. If you don't usually monitor that list, you might want to browse through the last couple of weeks posts. Continue reading
CRS reports to be released
Wikileaks plans to release nearly 10,000 Congressional Research Service reports. See: Wikileaks and CRS, Clay Shirky, Jan 28, 2009. Continue reading
Fake White House Tweet
Twitter says purported White House account was a fake, By Patrick Thibodeau, Computer World, January 22, 2009.
For more than a year, an @TheWhiteHouse account on Twitter Inc.'s microblogging site was used to dutifully send out more than 1,500 alerts about speeches, press briefings and other Bush administration news. The Twitter account's claim that it was officially sanctioned by the White House appeared believable, if only because it was so earnest — and boring. ...But it turns out that the account was a fake.Continue reading
Horizon Report 2009
The 2009 edition of the Horizon Report is now available:
- The Horizon Report, 2009 edition, the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI).
The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education. A collaboration between the NMC and ELI, the 2009 Horizon Report is the sixth in the annual series.... In defining the six selected areas for 2009 — mobile devices, cloud computing, geo-everything, the personal web, semantic-aware applications, and smart objects — the project tapped into an ongoing discussion among knowledgeable individuals in business, industry, and education, as well as published resources, current research and practice, and the expertise of the NMC and ELI communities.Continue reading
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