Comments on: Welcome to White House 2.0

By: Jake

Jake — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 01:49:26 +0000

And yet you still have no Beer and Blog chapter in DC. There are new chapters forming in Tokyo, Houston and Phoenix.

But seriously, I highly recommend attending these types of events, which are usually free (as in freedom), because you can learn a lot and meet like-minded folks. I expect the DC area to pick up steam now that the new administration is installed and pushing these types of events and thinking.

Good stuff.

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 23:31:56 +0000

And disclaimer = disclosure (always get those two mixed up).

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 23:28:37 +0000

For those in the DC area interested in government and technology, there are a number of unconferences in the planning:

http://barcamp.org/TransparencyCamp (Feb 28/Mar 1)
http://barcamp.org/Government20Camp (Mar 27)
http://barcamp.org/eDemocracyCamp2 (Apr 5)

Disclaimer: I'm one of the organizers of eDemocracyCamp.

By: Jake

Jake — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 04:08:09 +0000

As I mentioned, I loathe politics.

The robots.txt file seems to me more like the product of add-as-you-go maintenance and less a product of the administration. Or a conspiracy to hide directories from Google (and those other search engines). Plus, this is the beginning. We should check back in a few years to see if it's still the same.

I'm just glad to see technology take a bigger role b/c I'm a geek.

By: ontarioemperor

ontarioemperor — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 03:01:34 +0000

I'm of the opinion that it may be too much to read political intent into a robots.txt file. As I noted in the comments of a January 21 post in the Inquisitr (perhaps JR Raphael didn't have real work to do this week), perhaps there is a technical explanation for the different changes.

And I continue to maintain that technology, while it can be a tool to help you achieve a strategic goal, is not a goal in itself. To prove that, you only need to look at Ron Paul, whose campaign arguably had comparable technical savvy to Obama's. How many delegates did Ron Paul secure in his party's political convention? And he was beaten by John McCain, a person who, for whatever reason, doesn't use a computer personally.

The one thing that I will grant is that technology does give a government official an improved way to get his or her unadulterated message out to the people. And, if the government official allows it, it gives citizens an improved way to get their unadulterated messages back to the government official. Perhaps I can't send a tweet to my Congressman, but I can certainly send him an e-mail.

However, I don't believe that this is necessarily a sea change in WHY we do things, but just a technological change in HOW we do things.