President Obama Launches New Website – Recovery.Gov
President Obama has launched a new website, Recovery.Gov that people can use to see how their tax money is being spent. He stated that it is “an unprecedented effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government.” As of now, there is not much on the website but be sure to check it out after the passing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. To learn more about it, read his weekly address that he delivered on January 24. 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
Won’t Get Fooled Again: Day 5
I got say, having your Governor impeached by your State House of Representatives and about to be put on trial by Senate, starting tomorrow, just makes me all kinds of nostalgic for other moments of impeachment across this great land. Our Illinois legislature has not impeached or convicted a governor for misconduct for almost a century. In order to set up the structure of removing a sitting governor, our fearless legislative leaders modeled their actions on the impeachment of President Clinton ten years ago. Anxious to refresh my mind on the legal strategies and structures from that event, I wanted to see what artifacts remained on the web. I got to say -- Google was a failure in this kind of search --I turned up over 700,000 hits. The same search terms in usa.gov turned up 99 very specific and on scope hits In this way, the organized structure of the government trumps the expansiveness of the web. I will be very interested to see where (and how) the Obama civic machinery improves on the search capabilities of usa.gov. See you on Day 6 Continue reading
Ranking America
I came across Ranking America this evening. It provides information on the United States. Particularly, it compares America with other countries and also ranks it in terms of issues such as education, economy, environment etc. The information on this website has been compiled by Mark Rice, a professor of American Studies in a college in New York. Continue reading
Won’t Get Fooled Again: Day 4
A short message tonight. I was just looking at the State Department Web site and noticed its link to the Bush Administration only goes back as far as 2005. I can not find any reference to the critical years of 2001 to 2004, much less the Clinton years. I know 1995 -- 2000 exists (dosfan.lib.uic.edu) and (http://state.gov/index.html) as one of the first partnerships with GPO. But there is no direct link from the current state department web pages to these earlier entities. As much as we should worry about digital preservation, we should also worry about preservation of digital links from one administration to another. I think a mistaken impression has crept into our political culture that all information produced by executive offices changes with the regimes. I think this is a perception especially encouraged by all the recent press about Obama undoing several of Bush's executive orders. It leaves the impression that executive action can be changed and all earlier policies, decisions, actions are either not applicable or enforceable. I have sent an email message to the State Department web folks asking them to restore the links to the earlier material. See you day 5. Continue reading