The nauseating Lebron James-induced headlines this morning buried a story that has intrigued me for some time.
Google vs. China. The world’s largest search engine vs. the government of the world’s most populous country.
I wrote about this in Media Bullseye a few months ago (Is Google Really the Good Guy?) when, in January 2010, Google took what appeared to be a principled stand regarding Internet censorship – oh – and that their servers were hacked from China too. It was Google vs. China and the company placed a ten gallon white hat atop its head, let’s again remember, that they company AGREED to the Chinese government’s censorship policy when the entered the Chinese market. Period. Full stop. And today?
ZDNet reports that Google’s license to operate in China will be renewed. What? I thought that they were redirecting all searches to a server outside of China where the results are not subject to censorship?
Nope.
ZDNet writes:
The Google.cn home page now offers only a link to its “uncensored” Hong Kong site, but those searches are easily traced and China’s firewall can then censor the results. Services other than search are still run out of China. No Google user searching in the Chinese language can thus access information about anything the government decides, on its whim, the people should not know about. That was the government’s position all along. That position has been upheld.”
I am a bottom line sort of guy, so let’s cut to the chase. Google screamed and pulled out, but not really. Any link can be blocked in China. The U.S. government howled, but Google never pulled out of China completely. And today, very quietly, Google gets their license renewed.
Google seemed principled, but never bailed completely. In fact, they resorted to a public relations stunt backed up by a half-assed solution, which, in the end, was not where they ended up – right back to mainland China censorship.
Finally got around to testing Posterous tonight and I have to admit, it’s pretty cool. As good as advertised – through a single email, you can post to your blog, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr — about anything.
Pics below emailed from my iPhone. And The Boy snuck in the picture at the last second..
A friend of mine sent me an article in the Huffington Post today entitled It’s Time for a Wiki White House.There are some things that are somewhat visionary, but other things in this article that are just plain wrong.
Its author, Dan Froomkin, first takes a swipe out the outgoing President:
On that day, the Bush administration’s stodgy, wheezing version of whitehouse.gov will be carted off to the National Archives in its entirety, leaving precisely no legacy – and no limits.”
Dan then waxes poetic about what President-elect Obama way well be: the first Internet President:
If he and his team truly embrace the paradigms of the modern Internet — as defined by blogs and YouTube, Facebook and Google, instant messaging and crowdsourcing, wikis and reader comments — Obama’s whitehouse.gov will bring unprecedented accountability to the White House. It will offer a vastly better way for the American people to relate to their government — and maybe even learn to trust it again.”
This is all fine and good. President-elect Obama was voted in office to affect change. But here’s where the starry-eyed look gets in the way of the story:
Imagine a White House Web site where the home page isn’t just a static collection of transcripts and press releases, but a window into the roiling intellectual foment of the West Wing. Imagine a White House Web site where staffers maintain blogs in which they write about who they are and what they are working on; where some meetings are streamed in live video; where the president’s daily calendar is posted online; where major policy proposals have public collaborative workspaces, or wikis; where progress towards campaign promises is tracked on a daily basis; and where anyone can sign up for customized updates by e-mail, text message, RSS feed, Twitter, or the social network of their choice.”
Sorry to burst your bubble, Dan, but I work in Washington at a fairly high level in government. Here’s what is NOT going to happen:
Blogs: White house staffers may, in fact, be allowed to have their own blogs, but they will be so watered down by legal concerns that I fear that they might turn into a Twitter feed: “Just went out for coffee. Tastes burnt.” In a town where secrets are coveted but leaks like a sieve, there would be little compelling news to keep a blog fresh, but more importantly, interesting. The lawyers will do what they do, which is lawyer things to death.
Streamed meetings: Only the most vanilla meetings will be streamed. There is a reason why reporters are kicked out of the room when the real stuff happens. Anything else would be staged like a FEMA press conference.
Daily calendar. The President’s Daily Calendar would have to omit outside appearances, which would gut its effectiveness, because of Secret Service prohibitions. And why tell the opposition party that you are meeting on something that you might want to keep in-house. To do otherwise would be stupid.
Policy wiki. Major policy proposal proposal workspaces? Too many cooks spoil the broth. Research Selogene Royale’s presidential campaign in France. She turned her Web site into an electronic “listening tour” and requested policy input from French voters. She ended up with a party platform that stretched from Normandy to Nice. This is good in principle, and lousy in practice.
Campaign promises? Trust me, the Republicans will do that for them. And if they don’t keep a campaign promise, do you think the Web site will have a big, red “X” in the “We Didn’t Keep This” column?
Other tools: Twitter and .rss are good ideas, but I doubt that you need “pull” tools to draw attention to the President-Elect. These are good ideas if you are launching a company and trying to build traffic, but President-elect Obama won’t stay up nights wondering about his unique visits to WhiteHouse.gov.
To be perfect honest, Dan, there are a few good ideas in this, but I think that you have a) let your bias against the current President color your thinking about the Web site, and b) are examining the potential of what might be without considering the hard-core realities of how business gets transacted at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
I have a love-hate relationship with politics, and I get jazzed about social media. In the Media Bullseye Radio Roundtable I did last week, all of us predicted that we won’t have solid analysis for probably a few months in terms of the “youth vote” – what so many people are attributing to the rise of social media.
I have been watching the tea leaves a little, and thanks to Neville Hobson’s Tweet today, discovered that according to Valleywag, Obama’s Twitter account has gone silent since Election Day. So before you guys start jumping all over me about transition, etc., don’t think for a minute that President-elect Obama was himself tweeting over a cup of joe (the plumber?) in the morning. Valleywag says:
He didn’t even use Twitter to announce his transition website, change.gov — and what is Twitter for, really, if not spamming your friends with your latest URL? There’s no better sign that his 127,196 followers have been pumped and dumped.”
What I found equally interesting is that Newt Gingrich now has a Twitter account. By all accounts in the use of social media, the political Left is WAY ahead of the political Right, but the next two years are going to be interesting.
I have not had time to write in-depth about the intersection of social media and the recent U.S. elections, but had some fun doing a Media Bullseye Radio Roundtable (.mp3 file) yesterday.
There are some things that are somewhat visionary, but other things in this article that are just plain wrong.
Radio Roundtable I did last week
but had some fun doing a 
