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Archive for the 'Barack Obama' Category

Austan Goolsbee, Celebrity Wonk

Published by William Beutler on October 19, 2010 in Barack Obama, Rhetoric, Stephen Colbert, Web video, White House '12 and William Beutler. 1 Comment

Over the past few weeks, the White House has been sending its Council of Economic Advisers chair, Austan Goolsbee, out onto the Internet circuit with a series of videos to explain the current economic situation and the talk up president’s economic policies. They’re called “White House White Board” and represent perhaps the best Internet outreach by President Obama’s team since, well, maybe the 2008 presidential campaign.

The first one received more than 47,000 views on YouTube alone. This may not sound like a lot compared to “viral” videos with more than 1 million views, but it does appear to be the most popular video the White House has posted to its YouTube channel in several months. These days, most top out around 1,000 views, and even Obama’s own speeches are hovering around 20,000. Considering that views of 200,000+ was typical for many videos on Obama’s YouTube channel a year ago, here is an example of how President Obama’s online popularity has diminished. Meanwhile, it might well be fair to say that Goolsbee is the White House’s hottest star.

In addition to the 47,000-times seen video, Goolsbee took the same chart to the Colbert Report, where he squared off with Stephen Colbert and repeated his explanation of the president’s preferred tax bill.

The latest video was released just this morning, and it’s much like the last: Goolsbee stands in front of a pre-drawn chart on a white board and explains what it means. Maybe it’s not quite a true “whiteboard” video like American Public Media’s Marketplace Whiteboard or even those famous UPS ads. It only has a few hundred views as yet, but I’ll bet that’s about to change:

What really sells these, of course, is Goolsbee. He’s got great timing and just the right cadence for a video that’s meant to be both primarily informative and at least somewhat entertaining. One of Goolsbee’s quirkier resume items is having belonged to an improv comedy troupe at Yale, and perhaps it’s no surprise that he tried his hand at stand-up comedy earlier this year:

As this comedy blog observes, he doesn’t exactly knock ‘em dead, but he does have the confidence to deliver a much better performance, given stronger material.

In fact, that’s probably the biggest risk for Goolsbee and the White House — whether their material good enough for prime time. With the midterms in just a few weeks, the 2012 campaign will get under way soon. Is that enough time to work out the economy in small clubs web videos?

Bloggingheads.tv: The Bills are Back in Town

Published by William Beutler on June 29, 2009 in Barack Obama, Bloggingheads.tv, MSM vs. Blogs, Republicans, Scandal and William Beutler. Closed

Before this gets any more stale, I should get around to posting video of my most recent appearance on Bloggingheads.tv, the first in a few months now:

This was posted on Friday afternoon but recorded on Thursday at about 5:30 p.m. — just as news was breaking worldwide about the death of some guy named Michael Jackson. At some point near the middle of the recording, I will look down and to the left (my right) and tap on my iPhone, off-screen, puzzling over a text message from my brother:

Michael Jackson dead?

I had actually gone into the recording having heard that Jackson had been rushed to the hospital, but you know how it is — or was — with Jacko news. Always something. In any case, there is a moment immediately following where I contemplate mentioning this during the recording. It’s probably better that I didn’t. In any case, if you happen to pinpoint the moment where this happens, send me the dingalink — I’m curious tp see it, but I can never really watch very much of myself on these things (the Bheads commenters are too kind).

In any case, we talked about Mark Sanford’s press conference announcing his marital infidelity, the insider-outsider outrage (and inrage?) about President Obama’s semi-staged Q&A with HuffPo blogger Nico Pitney, plus upcoming bills on health care and the environment.

Internet Advertisers Turn on President Obama?

Published by William Beutler on March 22, 2009 in Advertising, Barack Obama, Entertainment and Google. 2 Comments

Clicking around ye olde Internets this afternoon, I stumbled across this Google ad on the repost blog of a colleague who was once the subject of a post on this site:

Can’t say I’d heard of SodaHead before, but it turns out to be:

a community that offers a free and dynamic environment to share and gather opinions and meet friends – a place to ask questions, express ideas, and connect with like and not-so-like friends… SodaHeads, as we call them.

So it’s like a more-interactive version of Vote.com, albeit without Dick Morris’ involvement. Moreover, I’ve never seen them advertise on Drudge, so I don’t think one can put them in with the “conservative T-shirt” crowd. It’s hard to say whether the Republican-oriented content of the site whence it came had anything to do with its placement, but given Google’s far-flung content network, I think it’s safe to assume this ad is running on many non-political sites. And it is, at least on the face of it, targeted at those who did vote for Obama.

One shouldn’t make too much of it, but count it as another warning sign that the president’s unicorn may be about to run off without him.

Macon Phillips Has Probably Had Better Days

Published by William Beutler on March 2, 2009 in Barack Obama, Tough Crowd, Web video and William Beutler. 3 Comments

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.

How I Spent Inauguration Day

Published by William Beutler on January 25, 2009 in Barack Obama, District Politics, George W. Bush, Hotline, Television, Twitter, White House '08 and William Beutler. 3 Comments

Four years ago when I was writing for The Hotline, I both had to work on Inauguration Day and also got out early to try attending the event itself. This year I did neither, thanks to no longer having to write against a daily deadline (while this post may be a few days late, that doesn’t mean it is in fact “late”) and my experience of getting caught in a massive, immovable crowd several blocks from the Mall and never even came close to seeing or hearing anything more memorable than a bunch of International ANSWER people waving homemade “BUSH = HITLER” signs.

Though I had successive waves of friends in town this year both to cover the crazy scene around the Inauguration Weekend and to participate in it, I myself decided to play the part of a jaded Washingtonian familiar with big crowds on the Mall and especially in the Metro, and took up a comfortable spot in front of my 65″ DLP and behind my 17″ MBP open to TweetDeck. Here are two representative shots, and the reason this post even exists.

     

This is the part where I think I am supposed to say something inspiring about the interconnectedness that results from the speed and ingenuity of modern technology, and how this has been said for a long time but with Twitter going mainstream and digital/HD television becoming the norm now the difference of degree almost itself becomes a difference of kind, well, I’m not sure I have the wherewithal to describe this as intricately as I would like. But you can give it your best shot in the comments.

Andrew Sullivan Finally Moves to the Left

Published by William Beutler on January 14, 2009 in Barack Obama, Beltway media, Internecine Battles, Leftosphere vs. Rightosphere, Seriously, Warblogging and William Beutler. 15 Comments

The buzz-elect is all about Barack Obama’s various meetings with various groups of Beltway intellectuals in the past 24 hours: Last night he dined with conservative writers at George Will’s house, and today he met with the liberals. Here’s the post as it headlined Marc Ambinder’s blog at The Atlantic earlier this afternoon:

Wait a minute, who was that first name on the list? Could that really be Andrew Sullivan? As in “conservatism of doubt” Andrew Sullivan? Author of “The Conservative Soul” Andrew Sullivan? The same Andrew Sullivan whose strident advocacy for the Iraq war made him one of the most influential voices among the online conservative commentariat?

Who among us could ever have imagined the day would come when Andrew Sullivan would break with his ideological compatriots and move to the left? I find it hard to believe myself, but if there’s one source we should be able to trust for the ideological affiliation of a blogger at The Atlantic, shoouldn’t it be a reporter at The Atlantic?

Barack Obama and Wikipedia are More Alike Than You Think

Published by William Beutler on January 12, 2009 in Barack Obama, E-mail, Mitt Romney, Online Fundraising, Swag, Tech Blogosphere, Website Design, White House '08, White House '12, Wikipedia and William Beutler. 15 Comments

I don’t know if most readers here would think that Wikipedia’s best-covered politician and Google’s best-listed website are all that similar, but I don’t think you can write it off entirely.

My reason for thinking so began after Mickey Kaus checked his e-mail inbox late last week, and asked:

Will Obama ever stop asking me for money? Or is it all fundraising, all the way out? … Not only is he still milking his supporters for money, he’s doing it in an obnoxious way, no? “Join us at the inauguration” turns out to mean “pay for other people to party at the inauguration you’re not going to”!

He’s got a point there. I’ve been on Obama’s list for more than a year now — my first post of 2008 was about how Obama’s campaign sent the year’s first campaign e-mail that New Years Day wee morning hours — and I’ve been getting (and half-paying attention to) them ever since. Here is my unofficial count (and anyone is welcome to do a recount) of the e-mails “Paid for by Obama for America” I have received in 2009, followed by that ubiquitous red button:

  • Join us at the Inauguration, Jan. 3, Obama for America
  • Our first guest, Jan. 6, Michelle Obama
  • Be there for history, Jan. 7, Bill Clinton
  • Deadline: Midnight, Jan. 8, Barack Obama
  • Re: Midnight deadline, Jan. 8, David Plouffe
  • Your call to service, Jan. 12, Michelle Obama

It’s a permanent campaign, all right.

He’s not President of the United States yet, I’ll give him that. But you would tend to think his fundraising goals have been satisfied — especially since his campaign let departing staffers have an extra month’s paycheck, plus their laptops and BlackBerrys (and a tip of the hat to Research in Motion’s PR department for getting reporters following AP style to not spell it “Blackberries”).

And you know what this reminds me of, as it might not remind most inside the Beltway? It’s not altogether unlike Wikipedia’s constant fundraising. As recently as December, Valleywag criticized the Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales-led on-site (always a banner across the top) fundraising drive mostly for being annoying and evidentiary of Wales being a poor leader of the website with the most comprehensive description of Regional variations of barbecue.

By early January, however, it turned out that Wikipedia had beaten its 2008 fundraising goals to the tune of $6.2 million. In the interests of disclosure as well as narrative, I’ll say that I donated as much to the Wikimedia Foundation this winter as I’ve donated in any one instance since Hurricane Katrina. So with that said, as I’ve been editing Wikipedia recently, I have often noticed this banner at the top of each article:

And what happens when you click on it? You come to a page with a letter of thanks from Wales. It looks like this:

Okay, so maybe Valleywag has a point about Wales as the public face of the website with the most informative biography of Portland, Oregon home furnishings salesman and television pitchman Tom Peterson.

And then, your eye drifts down the page to see this:

The permanent campaign, indeed.

P.S. I haven’t even mentioned that also this afternoon, Mitt Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC was asking $100 for this:

Don’t even get me started.

Obama’s Twitter Account Hacked

Published by William Beutler on January 5, 2009 in Barack Obama, Spam, Twitter and William Beutler. 12 Comments

As TechCrunch reported this morning, someone has been hacking into high-profile Twitter accounts and posting amusingly defamatory tweets. But here’s one they missed:

This tweet stayed up longer than the others. I learned about it just after noon today (hat tip: Brad Levinson) and finally was pulled shortly after I started writing this post. I’m of two minds on whether this is the same culprit: On one hand, the content of the tweet is much different — less mischievous, more promotional. On the other hand, that would be some coincidence, and Twitter’s recent phishing problems could be a bigger headache than its previous spamming problems.

The link behind the TinyURL is still available [Update: Apparently not anymore; if you really want to see it, just drop me a line], and it goes to a site owned by a company called Top Notch Media, Inc. that would very much like your e-mail address and some information about you while you’re at it. And hey, what do you know, it turns out Top Notch Media has been the subject of numerous complaints to Internet fraud watch sites. This is probably the last of it, although Exxon-Mobil may like to know that their logo is being used there, unless they already do, in which case somebody might want to alert Daily Kos.

Oh well, at least we know that Obama’s transition team is still aware that their Twitter account exists.

Twitter’s Top User Account Abandoned?

Published by William Beutler on December 2, 2008 in Barack Obama, Social Networking, Technology, Twitter and William Beutler. 18 Comments

You may not have noticed this, but the most-followed user account on Twitter has not been updated in nearly a month:

It wouldn’t have occurred to me to check, except that it was mentioned on the latest episode of This Week in Tech (where they are under the naive impression that Obama himself actually posts to the account). Apparently the inactivity has resulted in the account’s removal from Twitterholic, which keeps track of the most-followed accounts. And yet Obama still has nearly twice as many followers as the next, Kevin Rose.

So what’s the deal here? Is everybody just too busy with Change.gov? Will YouTube be Obama’s sole method of communicating with Internet users? That certainly looks to be the case. Once elected, it was inevitable that Obama’s communications strategy would become more conventional, but abandoning this direct line to supporters is somewhat perplexing. Why leave 140,000 followers on the table, especially now that Twitter is finally going mainstream? My guess is that they will use it again, after Obama assumes the presidency and wants to mobilize his supporters toward a particular goal, say, health care reform.

That said, it would behoove someone in Obama’s Internet shop to keep the account current, even by recording announcements of cabinet appointments. Events of the past week have underscored Twitter’s usefulness as a news source. Obama’s team would be wise to recognize this.

Bloggingheads.tv: Apres Moi, Left Deluge

Published by William Beutler on November 11, 2008 in Barack Obama, Bloggingheads.tv, Metapost, National Politics, Netroots, Online Campaigns, Web video, White House '08 and William Beutler. Closed

On Thursday afternoon, I recorded my latest guest spot on Bloggingheads with Bill Scher. I pretty strenuously object to the argument he puts forth — that America necessarily voted for a progressive approach to government last Tuesday — I certainly didn’t persuade him, but will I persuade you? I guess you’ll just have to watch and see: