infoverse

Our goal here is to keep politics and political parties out of this discussion as much as possible, and instead focus on general societal changes:

You’ve probably heard about Obama’s desire to keep his Blackberry and email accounts. This is the first time we’ve really had a president who used and relied on technology and email in this way. Clinton was elected in the early days of email so it was really a nonissue and Bush chose to give up his personal email address when he entered office. Obama has made it clear he depends on access to his Blackberry.

In addition to this, we saw major changes to the whitehouse.gov website today. You can see the before and after, if you’re interested. This is what the website looks like today:

Notice in the lower left corner: the whitehouse has a blog. Very recently blogging has been treated as a fringe activity, and is often not taken seriously. How does the inclusion of a blog on the whitehouse website potentially change the role of blogs in media? Is there anything that stands out or is missing from the whitehouse blog? What would you expect from a government that makes use of such media?