All of a sudden, I think I maybe know why President Obama abandoned his Twitter account.
To wit, it’s been a rough day for the Obama administration — and I’m not just referring to former Dallas mayor and U.S. trade representative-designate Ron Kirk’s tax issues — I refer also to their web team. First, an article in the Washington Post from Jose Antonio Vargas about the setbacks they’ve experienced in the transition from campaign to White House. For example:
Beyond the technological upgrades needed to enable text broadcasts, there are security and privacy rules to sort out involving the collection of cellphone numbers, according to Obama aides, who acknowledge being caught off guard by the strictures of government bureaucracy.
“This is uncharted territory,” said Macon Phillips, White House director of new media, which was a midlevel position in previous administrations but has been boosted by Obama to a “special assistant to the president.”
Phillips hails from Blue State Digital, although Vargas curiously omits that detail. Instead, he gives Phillips a chance to defend himself:
“WhiteHouse.gov,” Phillips said, “is not like BarackObama.com or Change.gov. We’re not running a campaign anymore. To us here, WhiteHouse.gov is not just a Web site. The new programs that we will roll out are more than just URLs. They are new ways to engage with citizens. Stay tuned.”
Phillips called the site “an ongoing experiment.”
At least, I think that’s what he did. Vargas uses the second half of the article to survey David Almacy, who held a similar position in the Bush White House, and Obama allies. It closes out with this quote from Andrew Rasiej, known best in Washington as co-organizer of Personal Democracy Forum:
“A lot more questions need to [be] addressed: Where do you insert the public comment portion in a bill? Do you start five days before the president signs it? Or do you start the moment Congress passes it?” asked Andrew Rasiej, founder of the political-tech site Personal Democracy Forum. He served as an adviser to the Obama transition’s technology, innovation and government reform group. “As of right now, the comment section is like a black hole. Of course it’s not enough by the standards of the Internet as we know it today.”
This morning after the story went up, Rasiej was moved to respond at TechPresident (which is really the active website; since it launched, the PDF brand has been primarily associated with the annual conference), with a diplomatic tone suggesting he was concerned about coming off too negative, which can be boiled down to the following sentence:
There was one more sentence in what I said to Jose that followed, but it was left out of his piece. I added, “But they will get there.”
But that may have been the highlight of Phillips’ day, because later this afternoon CNET’s Chris Soghoian reported that the Obama campaign web team has abandoned its YouTube channel for Akamai video distribution that made the top story on Techmeme. Soghoian explains the decision was in response to complaints by privacy activists:
The White House’s decision to move away from the Google-owned video-sharing site will likely be met with praise by privacy activists and could mark the beginning of a real backlash in response to Google’s insatiable thirst for detailed data on the browsing habits of Web surfers.
I wonder if this wasn’t done more to protect the White House than viewers on the site; after all, wasn’t this essentially the problem with President Obama’s apparently successful bid to keep his BlackBerry — that the data went through someone else’s servers? That said, I can’t see a White House video intended for public consumption ever being as sensitive as the president’s e-mail messages. [Update: I was right that it didn't make sense -- National Journal says it's not true.] Meanwhile, Vargas explains some of the limitations making Phillips’ job harder:
[T]here have been limitations. For some time, the site was not permitted to link to third-party sites whose URLs did not end in .gov or .mil, according to David Almacy, Bush’s Internet director from 2005 to 2007.
Some restrictions persist. For example, to comply with the Presidential Records Act, which mandates the preservation of all White House written communication, a Web page must be archived whenever it’s modified, slowing down a typically quick process of building new pages and refreshing the site.
Being president is hard work. Complying with the many, many regulations surrounding White House communications is harder. Some of them are good ideas meant to ensure transparency, but others are surely outdated like the third-party site link ban.
I realize that this White House is not exactly a big fan of deregulation, but maybe this a deregulation of communications protocols online is something they should consider. It might even put them back on Twitter.
In an ideal world, this post would have gone up during the week, but this one will have to do: Later today, I’m presenting at