Jim Stanton: December 2008 Archives

If you want a lesson on how to use Web 2.0 as a force for change look at how Macon Phillips and the other members of the Obama transition new media team hit the ground running and built a dynamic, responsive and refreshingly open and creative government website on www.change.gov.

They call it "An American Moment: Your Story"

The site says: 'We're counting on citizens from every walk of life to get involved. Share your experiences and your ideas -- tell us what you'd like the Obama-Biden administration to do and where you'd like the country to go.'

Every day they add some new element:

- Discussion forums on health care, the economy, and community service;
- Community rating of posted comments using IntenseDebate.com, a
third-party service;
- Responses from transition staffers on YouTube;
- A quick and friendly shift from copyrighting everything to using
the most open Creative Commons license and formats for sharing content;
- Posting the names of the outside groups lobbying the transition
as well as the text of their position papers, asking for comments on same; • An invitation to readers to host community-led health care reform discussion groups; and the
- Creation of "Open for Discussion," a gigantic open forum for
people to share the questions for the transition and vote the best ones to the top.

Recently, their Open for Questions feature was received by more than 20,000 people casting nearly 1,000,000 votes on questions posed by the community.

Overall, just over 10,000 questions were voted up or down and ranked by visitors to the site.

During the election campaign, Open for Discussion attracted 980,000 votes on over 10,000 questions from about 20,000 people in its first run.

Phillips' Media 2.0 team showed its peers across the web community that it's OK to 'build the plane while you're flying it,' and that small errors are easily corrected online when everything is understood to be in 'beta' as opposed to perfect from the start.

It's also worth a look at the Presidential Inaugural Committee's website, which looks and feels like it was also done by Phillips'
team.

They have a searchable, public database of donors to the Committee, that allows a 'virtually real-time' search by the donor's name, employer, city or state, as well as who has bundled contributions for the committee.

The list allows for dynamic displays, if you want to order donors by size or group them by employer.

All in all, it's a very impressive start and hopefully a good sign for how the Obama Administration will be using the Web 2.0 to move forward. Talk about raising the New Media bar!

Barrack Obama was the bolgoshpere world's first choice for President long before the polls opened on November 4th.

Now the Web 2.0 world is calling him the first "nerd' Commander-in-Chief. His aides say he will be the first American president to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval office.

When Obama was on the campaign trail he ran into Leonard Nemoy - Star Trek's Dr. Spock -  and greeted Nemoy with the four-finger Vulcan greeting sign from the show.

By the time Obama's campaign had wrapped up, he had more than three million Facebook friends and more that 970,000 on MySpace.

Obama is also determined to be the first President to have a national technical "czar" working for him and he will continue to use Facebook, his BlackBerry and his iPhone to stay in touch with America.

Since his election, he has become on of the hottest items on the Web.Not since Al Gore "invented' the Internet has technology been such a hot talking point in the corridors of power in Washington.

A free video game knock-off based on Super Mario, called "Super Obama", available at www.superobamaworld.com, shows a Mario-like creature of the President-Elect jumping on the heads of pigs wearing lipstick while collecting American flag lapel pins!

Jumping on the head of a Sarah Palin aide with a rack of designer clothes in hand nets the player 150,000 bonus points.

There is even a website - www.hackyourself.org - that allows users to plaster their faces onto Obama's body.

Is this the Web 2.0  version of the Franklin D. Roosevelt 1940's "fire-side" chats?


Photo by Stijn Vogels. Creative Commons License Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.

What do GPS, SIM cards, VOIP and BlackBerrys have in common?

They were part of the sophisticated world of Media 2.0 technology that arrived in the Indian sub-continent along with sub-machine guns, grenades and high explosives, in the hands of determined,  highly-trained terrorist attackers.

Heavily armed terrorists apparently arrived by sea to pin point locations in India by using Global Positioning System equipment, according to Indian investigators and police.

They were equipped with BlackBerrys, CDs holding high-resolution satellite images like those used for Google Earth maps, and multiple cell phones with switchable SIM cards that would be hard to track.

They communicated with each other and their leaders by satellite telephone.

While TV channels broadcast live coverage of the terrorist attack, TVs  were turned on in the hotel rooms occupied by the gunmen, to see what kind of coverage they were getting and to take evasive action if  necessary, according to eyewitnesses.

The flood of information about the attacks - on TV, cell phones, the  Internet - seized the attention of a terrified city, but it also was exploited by the assailants to direct their fire and cover their  origins.

"The terrorists would not have been able to carry out these attacks  had it not been for technology. They were not sailors, but they were  able to use GPS navigation tools and detailed maps to sail from  Karachi (in Pakistan) to Mumbai," said G. Parthasarathy, an internal  security expert at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

Citizen trapped in the Mumbai hotels and railway station sent images and text to the media and friends. Folks at home used the new  technology to communicate with relatives trapped in hotels and used  the Internet to try and fight back.

During the attacks, an organization calling itself Deccan Mujaheddin asserted responsibility in an email to news outlets that was traced to  a computer server in Moscow according to India sources.

The message, it was later discovered, originated in Lahore, Pakistan.

Investigators have said the email was produced using Urdu-language voice-recognition software to "anonymatize" regional spellings and accents so police would be unable to identify their ethnic or geographic origins.

When the gunmen called back to their leaders, their satellite telephones used voice-over-Internet-protocol(VOIP) phone numbers, making calls harder to trace. Once on the scene, they snatched cell phones from hostages and used those to stay in contact.

The lone captured gunman, Azam Amir Kasab, 21, told police he was shown video footage of the targets and the Google Earth images before the attacks, said Deven Bharti, a deputy commissioner in the Mumbai  police.

Intelligence agencies around the world have complained that Google Earth images contained too much detail about military sites and other defense installations.

Terrorists know how to use this new technology to further their aims.

Unfortunately, India's security forces do not make the same, instantaneous use of Media 2.0 applications. "The only people out of  the loop seem to be the Indian security forces. They are a generation behind in understanding the technology that the terrorists used," said Bharti

Government agencies need to be nimble and agile in monitoring the new  media and must come up with innovative ways to communicate in the age of Media 2.0 or they will leave themselves vulnerable to such attacks.

The terrorists learn from these situations. Do we?