Obama's Blog: The Briefing Room

Published January 20, 2009 @ 15:47 in Politics, Technology

MouseAt precisely 12:01 pm EST today, the new www.whitehouse.gov went live. Even though he hadn't yet said his oath, that's the moment Obama's presidency officially began.

The new site looks very modern and the heart of the content is the new White House Blog. It's called The Briefing Room and it's all about keeping American citizens, and the rest of us, in the loop. You can even subscribe to the RSS feed at http://www.whitehouse.gov/feed/blog.

I'm super biased, but I think a blog is a fantastic tool for the President and his administration to connect with the rest of the nation and the world. There are no comments accepted, I can imagine moderation would be a nightmare, but it is a new age idea from the first Internet Prez.

Welcome to the White House_1232482049343

9 Responses to "Obama's Blog: The Briefing Room"

Buffalo Boy Mike
January 20, 2009 / 16:21

That is what I like best about Obama, he understands the many ways he and his administration can keep us in touch with our government.

Toronto Mike
January 20, 2009 / 16:52

I love the change made to the robots.txt file. If you're not a webmaster, the robots.txt file tells search engines what to include and not include in their indexes.

Here's the robots.txt file from whitehouse.gov yesterday:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /omb/search
Disallow: /omb/query.html
Disallow: /expectmore/search
Disallow: /expectmore/query.html
Disallow: /results/search
Disallow: /results/query.html
Disallow: /earmarks/search
Disallow: /earmarks/query.html
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /360pics/text
Disallow: /911/911day/text
Disallow: /911/heroes/text

And it goes on like that for almost 2400 lines. Here's the new robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

Thanks to Kottke.org for pointing this out. It's like someone turned a light on in the White House.

Toronto Mike
January 20, 2009 / 21:32

It's true, Harper has a Twitter account @ http://twitter.com/pmwebupdates but I'm comparing and contrasting Obama with Dubya, not Harper.

Mike from Lowville
January 20, 2009 / 21:42

Your comparing apples and bowling balls. Guess what I'm implying?

Toronto Mike
January 20, 2009 / 21:47

Oh yeah, the new whitehouse.gov site has a Twitter account as well.

http://twitter.com/whitehouse_gov

And since I'm yakking about Twitter, you can follow Toronto Mike on Twitter too!

http://twitter.com/torontomike

Mike from Lowville
January 20, 2009 / 22:21

I tink I tried to twitter. I'm not even Sirius.

Trish
January 22, 2009 / 14:14

Maybe Obama can get hooked on The Briefing Room while weaning himself off his blackberry.

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September 11, 2009 / 10:15

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