Hey everyone,
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..
Posted via email from Mark’s Ponderous Posterous
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:
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.
Imitation is the best form of flattery.
Mark
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.
It was, as usual fun, and simultaneously enlightening. Thanks, Chip and Jen.
Mark
Like many other people who are my peeps, I start my day off with some online news, peruse a couple of 
blogs, check Twitter (my tweeps), and sometimes even jump over to Facebook.
But I think that I am going to opt out of social media for the next month or so. For me, it’s pretty simple.
I am hatin’ the hatin’.
Believe me, I am a First Amendment guy. Most of the free world does not enjoy the freedoms that we do (read: China) when it comes to expressing individual opinion, especially via a vehicle that is targeted for mass distribution, like blogs, Twitter or Facebook. But for me, it’s depressing as hell to open up social media tools and see so much venom spewed regarding the upcoming elections. Again, see above — I am a First Amendment guy — but I am so tired of reading what are supposed to be either pithy or downright mean-spirited comments from both sides of the political aisle. It’s a depressing way to start the day.
For example?
All of these represent Tweets or status updates that I have seen in the last week – hence, my decision to try to Opt Out of Ugliness. You see, I have lived and worked in the nation’s capital since 1987 and have never — ever– seen such venom on both sides of the political aisle. I am pretty sure that it was always there, it is just that the social-media-Hyde-Park-Speaker’s-Corner-Soap-Boxes did not yet exist.
So for all of you out there who are exercising your constitutionally-given right to express your political views, have at it.
But I can’t believe that I would EVER quote him — but of all of people, Howard Stern often said “if you don’t like what you are hearing, turn the radio dial.” So for a while, I am out of the ugliness.
Mark
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