Barack Obama and his rise through the ranks first as a presidential nominee and thereafter as the President Elect of USA is also fit to be an Internet marketing case study among many other historic things. And now as President of America he has bought his call of change in to the White House website – WhiteHouse.gov, by starting a blog on the famed pesidential website.
An article on the New York Times said that Obama changed the face of American politics with his use of the web, much like JFK did with the Television. That he went beyond mere fund raising to actively using what the web can do better than other media in terms of buzz, reach, and communication draws parallels with the fairy tails many digital marketers seek to script for brands online. Whether it was YouTube, or Twitter or Facebook or his website, he and his team used them perfectly, we can say that now because he won his election of course. Anyway, enough eloquents has been waxed already about it and I don’t intend to add to the clutter.
What is good to see though is that he hasn’t left behind the web legacy with the legacy of his remarkable campaign, instead he has carried the beacon of today’s communication to his new address. Obama had setup Change.gov immediately after winning the election for the web folk to follow him, and now that the transition has happened, ‘change’ literally has come to Whitehouse.gov.
The idea of introducing the blog in the president’s website is to satisfy three main points of the Presiden’t agenda:
- Communication
- Transparency
- Participation
In a rather descriptive post by Macon Philips, the Director of New Media at the White House, explains the point of having the blog and how the President wants his countrymen to use the facility. And as expected towards the end one also finds a call to the readers to provide feedback and suggestions on how they would like the blog to be used. Also, like almost all babies of the Web 2.0 era, the online activity of the White House would also be in perenial beta constantly changing.
The highlight of the blog is a proposal to use it as a medium for people to be involved (Participation).As the blog post puts across:
“One significant addition to WhiteHouse.gov reflects a campaign promise from the President: we will publish all non-emergency legislation to the website for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.”
To give a recce of the blog itself (I think recce is innapropriate, but I like the word) it has all subscription features you would expect including RSS and email but they are not shown prominently. Now I wouldn’t have bothered much about it considering it is not your regular run of the mill blog, but given the fact that communication is touted as an important aspect, and the inaugaral post mentioning these options to the reader, they probably could have made these easy to access. The blog doesn’t have a comments section either which is definitely understandable though. It is a custom made blog with 12 Javascripts and 5 CSS stylesheets and 6 JQuery scripts ( I don’t know what you are going to do with that bit of info).
There isn’t much to add beyond really, the only reason to even blog about the White House blog is that it has started a blog. That is a big deal for bloggers who realize and understand the power of blogs.
Here’s to a changing world and the changing faces of the good ol’ weblog.
COOL VIEW keep posting.
MOHIT GANGWAR