Wikipedia’s tenth anniversary occurred this past weekend, on January 15th. Alas, I did not make it to the local meetup in Washington, DC, where I live, but I did something else, something as fun as it was unexpected—I was on Ukrainian television.

Friday afternoon, a small TV crew led by reporter Maksym Drabok visited my apartment in Lanier Heights to record me talking about Wikipedia and even editing Wikipedia. Fortunately, I had some material about University of Oregon head football coach Chip Kelly waiting to be added, so I used the occasion to add a few more citations to his biographical article (it still needs more). Also featured in the segment was Thomas Boylston Adams, about the ne’er-do-well son of second U.S. president John Adams, which I created in April 2008 (while watching the HBO miniseries John Adams).

Also also featured: my home office, me in a wiki-related T-shirt, and the blog I write from the perspective of a veteran Wikipedian (fittingly, and as you probably know, it is called The Wikipedian). Here’s the segment in full:

Last but not least, thanks very much to Maksym Drabok and INTER TV for the opportunity.

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?

Apart from the auto-launching pre-roll ad—I tried and failed to pull this off DVR myself—not too shabby: I got two sound bites, the final conclusion restated in the reporter’s words, and some hilarious B-roll which is clearly the two of us shooting B-roll. Enjoy.

To begin, here’s erstwhile conservative John Cole making the former point:

Here is what I don’t understand about twitter. When blogs came out and started to rise in popularity, lots of folks in the MSM and elsewhere said “Great. Just what we need. The undigested, unedited thoughts of the rabble.” If blogs are the undigested thoughts, tweets are the orts.

Here’s Bloggingheads regular commenter B.J. Keefe, responding to new host Matt Lewis’ point — via my post here — that the Right is succeeding on Twitter:

Is this anything worth bragging about? What does it even mean, that there are more Republicans spewing out sound bites and ill-considered thoughtlets? … [G]iven the choice to “dominate” on Twitter compared to, say, the blogosphere, let alone actually getting people off their couches to go knock on doors, I know which one I’d pick.

Even as Markos Moulitsas has recently taken to Twitter, at least one Daily Kos community member decided to hoax the TCOT list about the contents of the stimulus bill — “$2 million for Shamwows” — and with some success, too. (On the other hand, this guy makes a good point.) And here is Gavin M. from Sadly, No!:

Twitter is that new thing that’s like burping the alphabet. Republicans are big on it because they have nothing to say.

He is being glib (what? impossible) but this is a trend, all right. What’s driving this attitude? We can’t ignore sour grapes — for the first time in a while, the Right is being recognized as doing something online better than the Left. It only makes sense the Left would want to minimize that, both to reassure themselves, discourage the Right and encourage skepticism among outside observers.

It’s absolutely true that, by itself, Twitter is a stunted communication tool. The brevity allows for faster communication, which also means less context and a greater likelihood of jumping to conclusions. Then again, the value of each individual tweet is infinitessimal and easily countered (the so-called “self-correcting blogosphere” in fact wasn’t, but the Twitterverse may be different).

Of course, there is a lot more to Twitter than 140 characters, thanks to its API and developer community. For those who may have not been following it closely, Twitpic lets you share pictures. Power Twitter embeds those photos (and links to YouTube) on the page. Utterli lets you post audio. Services like Bit.ly make it easy to track clicks on links you post. Both Farhad Manjoo and David Weinberger have recently explained how Twitter users have compensated for its limitations.

Twitter’s homepage famously asks “What are you doing?” but, famously as well I think, the vast majority of Twitter users ignore this question and say whatever they think needs to be said. Twitter is what you make of it.

Because the Left has seized higher ground on the wider blogosphere, the Right has turned its focus to Twitter, and Rob Neppell’s TCOT has helped them organize things like the aforementioned Tea Parties. Of course, this is why the Right went to the blogosphere eight years ago: they perceived the mainstream media as being controlled by the Left. There is obviously a pattern here, and it owes to the Right often considering itself in an oppositional role to the prevailing culture. (This is the same reason why the right-wing editorial positions of the tabloid New York Post and tabloid-y Fox News are so compelling: being oppositional is controversial and being controversial is fun.)

Interestingly, the Left turned to blogs in 2004 because they had lost an election and felt the media had turned against them, too. The difference is that the Left did not have a grievance culture already, and so had to create one. They did, and much of the credit for this has to go to Media Matters, whose founder David Brock literally wrote the book on The Republican Noise Machine.

The knock from lefty bloggers used to be (and still sometimes is) that conservative blogs didn’t have comment sections, supposedly because they couldn’t abide the awful things left-wing bloggers imagined right-wing commenters would say in such comment sections (even as conservative bloggers were making a cottage industry of cherry-picking the most outlandish comments out of Daily Kos, Democratic Underground and the like). Now with Twitter the complaint seems to be entirely the opposite: It’s all just chatter, there is no message to convey, &c. It’s one giant comment section.

But which is it? Well, it’s kind of both, right? Instapundit’s blog has long resembled a Twitter feed: short blasts of information with a link to longer commentary elsewhere, maybe a point of commentary and sometimes a photo as well. Twitter makes it possible for many more people (if not literally anyone) to be a clearinghouse of information for news and opinion, with Twitter itself nearly being a middleman like Google. The most-followed accounts on TCOT have tens of thousands of followers, and those with far fewer followers can specialize.

Why is this different from the blogosphere? It all has to do with the platform itself. In fact, it has a lot to do with the fact that Twitter is a single platform. Consider trackbacks, which were once supposed to be a way for bloggers to let other bloggers know they had linked to one of their posts. There was never a standard for trackbacks because blogs could be on Blogger, TypePad, WordPress or any other CMS or even be hand-coded, and so they never quite worked. But Twitter’s Replies tab (or as it’s been lately renamed, @USERNAME) works like a charm. Likewise, the column of recent tweets from those you follow provides a sense that others are reading what you write moments after you have said (tweeted) it.

Let me be clear: I do not mean that Twitter will grant everyone who signs up an Instapundit-like following. What I do mean is that by streamlining communication, Twitter significantly lowers the barriers to moving stories the way Glenn Reynolds does. And so few have shut down their blogs entirely; instead they are using Twitter to promote what they write in longer form there. The Twitterverse has not so much replaced the blogosphere as it has brought it closer together.

And yet Twitter’s efficacy as a communications medium is being questioned, too.

There’s a story going around lately — see TechCrunch, for example — about Moldova’s “Twitter Revolution.” If you’re not familiar with the situation, a series of anti-government protests in the Eastern European country have been widely perceived — see also CNN, for example — as being largely organized on Twitter.

Interestingly, this is probably not what really happened. The case has been made, persuasively to my mind, that Twitter’s user base in Moldova is too small to have been useful, and that so-ten-minutes-ago Facebook and decidedly unhip LiveJournal likely played a bigger role. It so happens this argument is primarily being made by blogs associated with the Left.

This is fine insofar as it seems to be a fair point about the case in question. But I suspect it may also also fuel the dismissal of Twitter on its own terms. Twitter may not have been the tech of choice this time, but that seems to be more about Moldova and less about Twitter. After all, it was already key to early news coverage of the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Imagine if Twitter had been around on July 7, 2005, where mobile phones were used to convey images from the scene. Had Twitter (not to mention Twitpic and Qik and the iPhone) existed then, more images, sounds and even video would have been posted quickly, aiding police and rescue workers.

Just because it wasn’t necessarily Twitter this time does not mean that it won’t be involved next. Of course a Twitter message can be cluttered with @s and hashtags, but the tweet is not always the last word or the end of the line. It’s more medium than message.

The Left should not be so quick to scoff about Twitter. If they laugh it off and fail to develop networks and innovative uses, they will fall behind, appearing relatively disconnected and even slow. Likewise, the Right should not rest on what it has already created, as it did by not continuing to improve its blog-based infrastructure following the 2004 election. If TCOT is the extent of the Right’s innovation on Twitter, they’re toast as well.

Neither Huffington Post nor Twitter are making any money right now, but if I had to choose one, I’d definitely pick the latter.

Photograph of Moldova protest via Cornel Ciobanu/EPA.

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.

What I can offer are details about the Convention Hub microsites. There will be two, one for each convention, with video and blog coverage around the clock:

• C-SPAN will provide exclusive video from the conventions, and for the first time, this C-SPAN video is searchable, clippable and embeddable. As someone who has tried (unsuccessfully) to jerry-rig an embeddable C-SPAN video in the past, this is a huge leap forward.
• NMS will feed the latest convention reporting and blogging to the Convention Hub pretty much non-stop. Or as our official language puts it, “extensive real-time blogosphere coverage using NMS’s proprietary combination of software and trained human analysts.”
• More about that software another time; all I can say is that it answers the questions I’ve asked about such analysis tools.
• The Hub will also include Twitter feeds of users using the hashtags #RNC08 and #DNC08 (and surely other tags, as their usage rises).
• The site goes live at c-span.org/politics later this month. The Democratic Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/DNC08 and the Republican Hub will be at c-span.org/politics/RNC08.
• NMS will have a presence at each convention to help to facilitate coverage and promote the Convention Hub. It certainly doesn’t hurt that we have bloggers credentialed to both (see you in St. Paul).
• There is more, but I’m not exactly sure what I didn’t see in the press release that’s public, so I’d better hold off for now. At the moment, this is the only public hint on c-span.org:

Meanwhile, the C-SPAN Convention Hub is already drawing praise from one of C-SPAN’s (few) notable critics. The Sunlight Foundation has differed with C-SPAN before over distribution of copyrighted C-SPAN video, so they are enthusiastic about the open nature of the Convention Hubs:

The convention announcement marks a new moment for C-SPAN as a modern Internet information provider. Once a small cable channel with a dream; now with embeddable web video, Twitter hashtags, and aggregated blog posts.

As a longtime C-SPAN junkie, I couldn’t be more proud to play a small part in this project. How dependent am I on the C-SPAN network?

• I wake up to Washington Journal every weekday morning (my Twitter account will bear this out).
• Before I found podcasts, I’d listen to streaming Realplayer segments from the program (I still listen to the podcast of Brian Lamb’s Sunday night Q&A).
• Back in college I would sometimes wake up early (4 a.m.) to catch particular episodes live, such as the first of the Hitchens-Sullivan conversations with Lamb, shortly after 9/11.
• If it’s the weekend and my television is not on baseball or football, it’s on BookTV.
• The tagline of my personal blog, The Washington Canard, is: “Where C-SPAN is the local TV news.”

The good news is that it’s a supportable addiction.

And by way of conclusion, a confession: I want this searchable video for my own reasons. On Election night 2004, The Hotline worked all through the night covering the coverage, as the election tipped from Kerry winning the exit polls to Bush winning the popular vote. If you’ve seen my Facebook photo, this is where that crazy image comes from.

As usual, C-SPAN cameras were in the office for Chuck Todd and Vaughn Ververs to offer recaps, also deep into the morning hours. Sometime around 3 o’clock in the morning, I informed friends watching the coverage from back on the West Coast to look carefully: As the cameras rolled, I picked up a plastic trash bin and… well, I danced through the background.

The waltz, I think.

I entered left with vulcanized dance partner, twirling across one shoulder, behind the talking head, past the other shoulder, exiting right. To this date, it’s still my best television appearance. And I look forward to the day, much sooner now, that I can embed this on Blog P.I.

I might as well get this out of the way: I am not actually about to eat the viewer. It just looks that way.

Making the rounds of the political blogosphere is an op-ed by novelist Andrew Klavan from today’s Wall Street Journal titled “What Bush and Batman Have in Common”:

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society — in which people sometimes make the wrong choices — and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

“The Dark Knight,” then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year’s “300,” “The Dark Knight” is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

It may also be worth noting that comic book writer and artist Frank Miller, author of the graphic novels “300″ and 1986’s “The Dark Knight Returns,” upon which all non-Schumacher Batmans since have been modeled, is working on a new Batman graphic novel: “Holy Terror, Batman!” Yes, it’s Batman vs. al-Qaeda.

The second Bush-Batman juxtaposition, which I first saw on Digg yesterday, is a series of Leno-esque person-on-the-street interviews by Philadelphia sketch comedy troupe Secret Pants. The interviewer has a set of quotes that were spoken either by President Bush from 1600 Pennsylvania or Adam West from the 1960s TV show. Passersby are asked to guess which. It’s definitely worth your 3:35:

This weekend I made my second appearance on Bloggingheads.tv’s “The Week in Blog” series opposite Bill Scher. I got the call sort of last-minute, so I wasn’t nearly as prepared this time as my first appearance last month. Yet I think I came across as better prepared. Maybe that has something to do with having already done it once; maybe it has something to do with not over-thinking it for a week beforehand.

We talked about liberal and conservative reaction to District v. Heller, the relative recent success of Newt Gingrich’s “Drill Here” petition, Barack Obama’s stance on nuclear energy and John McCain’s awareness of the Internet.

P.S. Coincidentally, my colleague Jon Henke filled in on Bloggingheads just last week. And yes, this does probably does mean that New Media Strategies is taking over the world, one diavlog at a time.