CNN’s THE MOMENT – stitched with Microsoft’s Photosynth, an impressive tool for stitching together dozens of photos to allow a place or event to be viewed from multiple angles.

The only hard part is it really takes 75 photos or more to get the optimal experience. That’s a lot of work for one photographer. But, with big events, one can also rely on crowdsourcing. Which is what CNN has done with the inaugural, asking viewers to send in their photos of Barack Obama’s swearing in.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2009/44.president/inauguration/themoment

GOOGLE SATELLITE PHOTOS – GEOEYE-1 captures some amazing images of the inauguration.

[Click each image to Enlarge]

1,474 Megapixel Inauguration Panorama Shot – this is my favorite. A really powerful CANON G10 Bridge Cam, taking a panorama of the inauguration. Try to zoom and and read the musicians sheet music, or check out Yo Yo Mo taking pictures on his iPhone.

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapanFullscreen.php?auth=033ef14483ee899496648c2b4b06233c

In November, not two weeks after winning the election and still two months from becoming commander in chief, Barack Obama brought the government into the 21st century. Or at least that was what we were told when he released his first Web video address as president-elect. The clip, billed by some as a modern fireside chat, was embedded as a YouTube video on Change.gov, the incoming administration’s Web site. Sitting in a leather chair, framed slightly off center from his chest up, Obama delivered a three-minute talk on the economic crisis, vlog style.

The video quickly racked up hundreds of thousands of views, and within a few days hundreds of blogs were linking to it. Obama’s foray into viral video, the story went, heralded the beginning of a new era in government communication and transparency—”Franklin Roosevelt 2.0,” in the words of The Huffington Post. The Washington Post proclaimed the advent of the “YouTube presidency.”

1 million:
The number of views received by Obama’s first YouTube address as president-elect.

It wasn’t long, however, before savvy observers noted what was missing from this and other Obama videos: the chance for ordinary citizens to talk back. The campaign initially disabled the comment function on YouTube and prevented response videos from appearing alongside. A YouTube video without comments, some pundits groused, is more like a monologue than a chat, fireside or not. “I don’t see how one-way messages provide any more transparency for the work of the White House or government than the current old-style radio addresses,” blogged Ellen Miller, director of the Sunlight Foundation, a government-transparency watchdog group. “Is Obama ready,” challenged TechCrunch, “to be a two-way president?”

Of course, Obama’s transition team had good reasons for disabling responses. For starters, YouTube comments are typically the intellectual equivalent of truck-stop graffiti. (When the team belatedly allowed comments a couple of weeks later, the site was flooded with insights like “USA susks.”) Also, his team would have zero control over the potentially critical or embarrassing response videos that users would post next to the address. The real reason, however, was that Obama wasn’t actually trying to have a conversation with Americans via YouTube. Like every president before him, he was simply harnessing the latest tools to talk to them, one-way.

Technophiles who watched the campaign closely expected more, and now they are putting pressure on the White House to govern with unparalleled transparency and citizen interaction. Dan Froomkin of the Niemen Watchdog Journalism Project and The Washington Post summed up expectations in a blog post calling for Obama to embrace “wiki culture” in which “major policy proposals have public collaborative workspaces.”

150,000+ subscribers
follow Obama’s Twitter feed.

0 tweets
have been posted by Obama staffers since the election.

Obama has himself to blame for raising such expectations. During the campaign, he embraced every form of social media. At My.BarackObama.com, supporters could create profiles, talk to each other, and—by election day—plan some 200,000 offline dinners and living room fund-raisers. Users could log in from home to get lists of swing-state voters to telephone; this generated 3 million calls in the final four days of the race. Those efforts were combined with massive database-crunching to identify potential voters who could be approached door-to-door by last-minute canvassers, myself included.

As for John McCain’s efforts, well, he didn’t really have any. According to Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry, cofounders of the Personal Democracy Forum and the blog TechPresident, Obama had four times the number of Facebook supporters, 24 times the Twitter devotees, and three times the visitors to his site in the final campaign week. The public watched about 15 million hours of Obama campaign videos on YouTube. Along the way, Obama collected 13 million email addresses, more than a million cell phone numbers, and a half-billion dollars in online donations.

There’s also another reason to expect a tech-driven presidency: Obama promised it. He said he would expand government transparency by putting more data up on the Web, streaming meetings live, and letting the public comment on most legislation for five days before he signs it. He said he would bring blogs, wikis, and social networking tools with him into the executive branch—all overseen by a new national chief technology officer. Indeed, Obama’s transition site, Change.gov, offers glimmers of a potential digital presidency with its YouTube addresses, issue-based discussion forums, and inside-the-transition videos featuring future cabinet members responding to comments.

But turning his innovative campaign and transition into Government 2.0 won’t be easy. The nimble Obama startup is about to be absorbed into a stodgy, technologically backward behemoth: the federal government. Ahead are bureaucratic obstacles the campaign never imagined, along with the political land mines that transparency brings. Obama will have to preserve the enthusiasm of his supporters while engaging the larger group of people who either didn’t vote for him or didn’t vote at all. His task is to rebuild the personal connection that supporters felt they had with Obama the candidate, assuring them that he is listening to them—without being deafened by the cacophony. If he can do that, Obama can alter how the government engages its citizenry and accomplish what he really cares about: his own policy goals.

Building that intimacy from the Oval Office will be a delicate and complex task, and just letting “AcidTrout” respond to a YouTube address with “Who’s the black guy?!?” isn’t going to do it. “One of the things that gives me ulcers is that there are a lot of high expectations,” says an Obama aide. “But we’re going to have to change how government thinks about the Internet before we can do the things we want to do.”

500+ PDFs
submitted by third parties for viewing and public comment are available on Change.gov.

Still, Macon Phillips, the campaign’s deputy director of new media, who has served in a similar role for the transition, warns: “Day one is going to be a lot different than perhaps day 100.”

The basement of the General Services Administration building in Washington, with its maze of identical hallways and frosted glass doors, reeks of generic federal bureaucracy. But if the new administration plans to reboot the system, it will find a pair of guides here in Bev Godwin and Sheila Campbell, cheerful doyens of the executive branch’s Web strategy. Godwin, director of USA.gov, the federal government’s all-purpose information Web portal, and Campbell, head of the government’s Web Best Practices Team, know every manacle and chain shackling the government to the 20th century. In a drab conference room one afternoon in late November, they discussed their optimism—and detailed their concerns.

For starters, the federal government operates more than 24,000 separate sites, many of them years out of date. “Nobody stepped back and asked strategically, how do we do this?” Godwin says. “Whenever there is a new initiative or program, they put up a new Web site.” And the first thing they usually do on that site, she says, is post a bandwidth-hogging picture of the bureaucrat in charge.

3,701 comments
on health care were submitted online to secretary of health and human services designate Tom Daschle.

Godwin and Campbell have been pushing government agencies to treat citizens more like customers, rebuilding their sites to help visitors do things like find loans or obtain passports—rather than serve as static repositories for press releases and personnel photos. “At Housing and Urban Development, for example, one of the missions is to reduce homelessness,” Godwin says. “If you go to HUD.gov, can you find shelter? The answer is no.” If the government can improve itself in these little ways, they say, great. Don’t worry about trying wild stuff, like setting up federal social networks. Many agencies bar employees from even looking at sites like Facebook at work, much less building their own versions.

Progress has been achingly slow. There have been some notable exceptions—like a blog on the Transportation Security Administration Web site, open to comments and manned by five agency staffers, and NASA.gov’s numerous social media initiatives, including Twitter feeds from 20 missions and projects. But the successes are rare and isolated. “We know that there are a lot of people advocating for more open government,” Godwin says. “We’re saying, absolutely, put the data out there. But I think we have to be realistic.”

For example, many of Obama’s online campaign techniques would be impeded by a collection of obscure and well-intentioned rules. Amendments to the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, for example, require that all government Web content be made reasonably accessible—in real time—to disabled users. Also, six months of negotiations between the General Services Administration and Google to establish a federal YouTube channel have stalled over similarly intricate legal issues. Meanwhile, a Clinton-era law called the Paperwork Reduction Act requires that an agency undergo a laborious approval process any time it “surveys” more than 10 people. The result: “Agencies tend to avoid doing these kind of surveys,” Godwin says. Would having users submit information to a social network or wiki count as a survey? Nobody knows.

20.3 million:
The number of visits to Obama’s YouTube channel since its September 2006 launch.

Even triumphs like Obama’s 2006 Google for Government bill, cosponsored with Republican senator Tom Coburn, have been caught up in red tape. The bill led to the creation of FedSpending.org, a site allowing the public to track federal contracts and grants. Instead of building it in-house, the Office of Management and Budget decided to license something similar from a nonprofit watchdog group, OMB Watch—for just 4 percent of what the government had expected to spend. It was a striking victory for government efficiency, but the process behind the scenes “was extremely difficult,” says Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch. After floating the idea of donating the system to OMB (“the government can’t take things for free,” Bass quickly learned), the nonprofit had to sign on as a subcontractor and undergo three rounds, and six wasted months, of bidding before the deal was complete.

Changes to what is effectively the president’s homepage, WhiteHouse.gov, will encounter similar obstacles. David Almacy, a PR executive and new media consultant at Waggener Edstrom who served as the Bush administration’s White House Internet director from 2005 to 2007, recalls that following Hurricane Katrina, he posted the transcript of a speech to the site. In the text, where Bush had directed people to Redcross.org, Almacy helpfully inserted a hyperlink. “Within a few hours,” Almacy says, “I got a call from the White House general counsel’s office saying I needed to take out the link.” Some federal government Web pages, it turns out, are virtually barred from linking to nongovernmental sites to avoid the appearance of endorsing one product or organization over another.

The incoming administration is still working to assess the implications of the Presidential Records Act, the post-Nixon legislation requiring the preservation of all White House written communications. But that means that once any page goes up on the White House site, it can’t be altered, only archived and replaced, greatly slowing down the process of modifying and enhancing pages.

The Obama team was able to sidestep these kinds of troublesome rules on Change.gov, in part because, as a quasi-governmental site, it’s not subject to executive-branch restrictions. They were able to post videos on YouTube, link to outside sites, and even publish content under a Creative Commons license, allowing it to be freely shared.

24,000 Web sites
are operated by the US government.

When he does arrive at the White House, Obama or his CTO can lift some of the Internet restrictions with the stroke of a pen. Others will require congressional action or clever technology.

Even if Obama’s tech team gets a free hand to rework the federal webosphere, things can still go awry. Take the 2006 race of Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick. Both David Axelrod, Obama’s top campaign strategist, and David Plouffe, his campaign manager, worked for Patrick, a little-known candidate who used Internet-driven grassroots support to win. In a precursor to My.BarackObama .com, the Patrick campaign placed the state’s voter list on its Web site, allowing its supporters to download phone numbers and call neighbors. “We believed in people’s ability to organize themselves and get involved,” says Charles SteelFisher, who ran the campaign’s Web operation.

No We Can’t

Barack Obama wants to transform the way the White House connects with the public. But there are plenty of obstacles standing in his way. After the election, the governor’s team launched DevalPatrick.com to keep supporters engaged. On a MyIssue page, registered commenters could propose, comment on, and vote for legislative ideas.

But the administration was immediately blasted when a database feature designed to verify Massachusetts residency was alleged (incorrectly) to reveal unlisted phone numbers. The privacy flap lured a collection of trolls and conspiracy theorists to the site, crowding out earnest discussion on gambling bills and income taxes with 9/11 chatter and religious debates. Critics, meanwhile, said that Patrick’s efforts were less about engaging the public than about running a permanent online campaign.

Eventually Patrick’s Web site recovered, developing a more sophisticated way of moderating comments and creating forums around the governor’s plans to reduce property taxes and add public kindergarten programs. The site also allowed people to create grassroots communities to work on issues they cared about. Still, the public isn’t exactly burning up the site: The leading vote-getter, a bill to promote fathers’ custody rights in divorce cases, had just 1,100 tallies as of mid-December. Offshore wind power, meanwhile, was losing, 16 votes to 15.

Obama’s team has moved carefully as it transitions from campaigning to governing. Between two wars and an economy in shambles, building an Oval Office social network has not topped the priority list. “Day one, do we need a White House My.BarackObama? I don’t think so,” says the Obama aide, who was required by the transition press office to speak anonymously. “It’s more important to step back and ask, what are the goals for the White House? And I think that making the government more accountable and transparent is more important than getting people to act.”

To that end, the transition team served up small accountability stuff first. Change .gov supplemented Obama’s weekly YouTube addresses with periodic videos from inside the transition process, everything from staff meetings to vlog-type updates from advisers. In early December, Obama’s public director of liaison and intergovernmental affairs announced—via video—a Change.gov feature called Your Seat at the Table, through which the transition would post every document received from every interest group and outside person throwing it advice. Users were allowed to comment next to the documents, while the Open for Questions feature let them submit and vote on questions for the transition team. The latter experiment illustrated the double-edged nature of feedback when the Senate-seat-selling scandal involving Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich broke. Supporters began flagging related questions “inappropriate,” and then Obama staffers buried the queries. ABCNews.com jumped on the story and the apparent hypocrisy. Obama Transition Web Site ‘Open for Questions’—Except on Blagojevich read the headline.

Change.gov does feature some Slashdot-like issue forums where user rankings send the most popular comments to the top. The first forum, in which two staffers appeared in a short video on health care policy and asked for comments, garnered thousands of horror stories and policy prescriptions. A week later, one of the staffers reappeared with future health and human services secretary Tom Daschle in a rehearsed-looking YouTube video response. “We are just so pleased that so many of you have written in,” Daschle said, appearing extra-pleased. “I spent a lot of the weekend actually reading the comments … We want to make sure that you understand how important those comments and your contributions are.” The comments the pair selected to discuss, however, seemed serendipitously aligned with Obama’s proposed initiatives.

550,000 responses
came in from supporters after Obama adviser David Plouffe requested feedback about the campaign.

In other words, with everything he’s done so far, Obama has been acknowledging feedback but not necessarily heeding it. And that’s what we can expect from Obama’s plan to post all pending nonemergency legislation online and allow the public to comment for five days before he acts on it. By mid-December, technology advisers were still struggling to determine the best way to implement the idea. The bigger question is, what will it accomplish? Even the system’s own architects concede that it’s unlikely that online comments and voting will sway the decision to sign or veto.

Nor should it. The Obama team, for all its Web enthusiasm, recognizes that an online community—no matter how vibrant—doesn’t represent all of the American public. “A lot of people consider online interactions and communications as representative of Americans. But we have a lot more high-speed Internet lines to drop before that’s true,” the Obama aide says. And even with ubiquitous broadband, online voting would remain the ultimate in self-selected polling. There’s no reason to believe that commenters would reflect Americans as a whole or even that they’d be Americans at all. Citizens also may not be as interested in the daily machinery of Obama’s workaday government as they were in his novel campaign. Case in point: By mid-December, views of Obama’s weekly YouTube address had dropped by half.

Still, the new administration wants to be able to marshal its supporters to act. Obama himself suggested as much last April. “Our database has a couple million people on there who are activated and inspired,” he told a small group in Indianapolis. “And so what I want to do is to continue that after the election.” In mid-November, Plouffe sent out a series of emails to supporters. The first directed them to a detailed survey of their campaign experience and policy interests and told them, “It’s up to you to decide how we move forward.” Later, a Plouffe missive declared that “you’ll be instrumental in generating support to pass legislation that puts America on the road to recovery.” At a closed-door meeting with its leading activists in Chicago in December, the Obama team took it a step further and told activists to be ready to pressure Congress on economic stimulus, health care, and energy legislation. A couple of weeks later, the campaign encouraged its supporters to organize “change is coming” get-togethers to discuss the future of the Obama movement, online and off.

Obama doesn’t want his 13 million-name email list to serve as just another political interest group. He needs it to be a tool to keep people engaged with his politics and policies. “Even if you push through the best government programs,” says Michael Cornfield, a political-science professor at George Washington University, “it’s hard to solve the actual problems” without effort from regular people. A national health care plan, for example, will work a whole lot better if former precinct captains are willing to explain it to their neighbors, just as they explained how to get to the polls. And a presidential Twitter feed, Flickr photos, or WhiteHouse.gov video Q&A sessions may not vastly increase transparency or deeply inform policy, but they create a valuable intimacy with citizens. “People who think they are being listened to tend to respect more the person talking,” says Rasiej.

That may not sound like a big deal. But contrary to what Web evangelists and the incoming administration would like to believe, Obama’s campaign was never a bottom-up endeavor. The incoming president didn’t crowdsource his view on the Iraq war or use Digg to determine how to allocate campaign dollars. He ran one of the most tightly controlled, top-down campaigns in modern history, to the point of pressuring outside advocacy groups not to advertise on his behalf. Rather, he asked his supporters for money and inspired them to get involved, giving them the tools to organize themselves and a message to sign on to.

Instead of turning WhiteHouse.gov into a governmental synthesis of Facebook and Wikipedia, or running a permanent campaign off the White House email list, Obama’s best shot at rebooting the government is to remember how he got there: making people feel that they were part of the solution and then enabling them to talk to one another and take action. “There is a relationship between Barack Obama and each individual, and that’s multiplied tens of millions of times over,” says Joe Rospars, the campaign’s director of new media. “But there are also millions and millions of relationships between our supporters. Both of those kinds of relationships didn’t end on Election Day.”

[via WIRED] by Evan Ratliff

Inquiries, Sales and Funding Rise in Anticipation of New Regulations — and Spending — From Obama Administration

While many small businesses continue to struggle with tight credit and declining sales, one fledgling industry is seeing a boom in investment and sales growth: alternative energy.

Alternative-energy firms are reporting an influx of inquiries and business from a wide range of companies looking to increase their energy efficiency, especially from those that believe the Obama administration will impose stricter regulations requiring them to conserve energy. President-elect Obama has spoken often of the importance of alternative energy, also known as clean technology, and his federal stimulus package is expected to include plans to beef up alternative-energy infrastructure and improve energy efficiency in government buildings. In a speech last week, he called for the U.S. to double the production of alternative energy in three years.

So start-ups across a variety of areas — solar power, biofuels and energy conservation among them — are getting increased financing from venture capitalists and lenders at a time when other small companies are cutting back and being turned away by investors. And many are hiring more staff, boosting marketing efforts and expanding geographically.

Alternative energy “has been the brightest sector in venture capital over the last year,” says Brian Fan, research director at Cleantech Group, an industry trade organization in San Francisco. “Everyone is thinking it’s going to be a big priority of the incoming administration.”

While the overall volume of venture-capital deals sank last year, investments in clean-technology companies totaled $8.4 billion, up nearly 40% from 2007, according to Cleantech Group. In the third quarter alone, venture capitalists poured $2.6 billion into clean technology, a quarterly record. In the fourth quarter, they invested $1.7 billion.

Some venture capitalists think clean technology is the next big thing — the innovation that will drive the economy, much as Internet-related ventures did a decade ago. “Anytime big innovation comes along, it brings the chance to build big companies,” says Erik Straser, general partner at venture-capital firm Mohr Davidow Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif., which has investments in several alternative-energy start-ups.

But whether the administration will turn to energy initiatives quickly enough for all these companies to reap the rewards remains to be seen. And unlike with other new types of technology companies, the growth of clean technology “depends on the right kind of government policies and incentives,” Mr. Fan says, because implementation requires a certain amount of infrastructure and tax credits to offset the expense for users.

“The policy side is absolutely critical,” he says. “If [the right policies] don’t get pushed through, we will see a good number of these start-ups suspend operation.”

Just the anticipation of a new administration has been enough to spur interest among companies. Green Panel Inc., a solar technology and installation company in Brighton Mich., is planning to add four employees to the 14-person, two-year-old firm over the next few weeks to handle new business that has come in since the election. Even though no new energy regulations are in place yet, big companies are starting to take a look at alternative-energy options, says Adam Harris, Green Panel’s chief executive. He says one industrial firm held off on an order of solar panels until after the election. And he has heard from other firms whose executives want to have systems in place ahead of any regulations for big companies.

“What’s really changed is the push from the top — the fear of what could happen if they don’t” put plans in place to cut dependence on nonrenewable energy like fossil fuels, Mr. Harris says. The firm expects to double its revenue this year to nearly $4 million.

Executives at venture-capital backed Greenline Industries Inc., a Larkspur, Calif., maker of biodiesel production equipment, believe the Obama administration will create a huge demand for biodiesel and other advanced biofuels. The president-elect has said he’ll require that 60 billion gallons of advanced biofuels are produced by 2030, spurred by tax incentives and government spending. The appointment of former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary makes increased demand even more likely, Greenline executives say, because of his commitment to ethanol production in his state.

Greenline, which has 35 employees, declines to offer specific projections but plans to triple its sales staff in the coming weeks. “It’s a reaction to the administration change and to changes we expect as a result of the people [Mr. Obama] has picked — the policies that will be happening and the growth in demand we expect,” says Donn Tice, Greenline’s chief executive. The company’s latest round of venture-capital financing was in March, for $20 million.

Mr. Tice says calls from potential customers have picked up in the weeks since the election, and he expects the pace to accelerate once Mr. Obama takes office. In December, Mesilla Valley Transportation signed a deal with Greenline for a 10 million-gallon processing plant, part of a multistage, $25 million project of a company offshoot called Global Alternative Fuels. The election “expedited things,” says Dean Rigg, chief financial officer of the transportation company in Las Cruces, N.M., which started processing biodiesel fuel with Greenline equipment about 2½ years ago. “We’re all betting” that a push toward new biofuels will come quickly from Washington, he says.

Two weeks after the inauguration, Greenline plans to launch a new corporate logo and a new tagline: “Ask Greenline.” Michael Brown, the firm’s founder, says it’s a response to the idea that more and more people are asking how to develop alternative fuels.

Some small companies are counting on the government itself for new business. Verdiem Corp. sells software that provides centralized control over power consumption, such as remotely turning off computer monitors left on overnight. Over the past year and a half, most of the Seattle-based company’s growth has come from corporate customers. But with Mr. Obama’s declarations that he plans to improve the government’s own energy efficiency, Verdiem Chief Executive Jeremy Jaech sees opportunity. The 60-employee company is planning to add three or four new salespeople to its 20-person sales staff in the weeks ahead to focus specifically on federal operations in Washington, D.C. The company hopes to win the business through the information-technology companies that play a role in managing government buildings.

Mr. Jaech believes Mr. Obama will need to practice what he has preached, reducing energy consumption on the federal government’s estimated 6.5 million personal computers. And Mr. Obama will have to start with his own offices, he believes. For his company, Mr. Jaech adds, “it’s low-hanging fruit.”

But while Mr. Jaech anticipates quick growth from Washington, Verdiem is hiring in stages. “I know the federal government can take a while to do things,” he says.

[via WSJ Small Business] by Simona Covel at simona.covel@wsj.com

I’ve been fascinated by the analysis of the Obama campaign. In many ways, Obama’s campaign and its success is a big, bright, “LCD sign” of the times. New media has come of age in a very public way.

Most people seem to agree that the campaign used a number of techniques to capture an audience and even inspire the traditionally unenthusiastic. Some of my favorite attributions are:

Audacity – the fact that Obama wasn’t afraid to “redefine his target audience” and go after states like Indiana who this November voted for a Democrat for the first time in 44 years.

Mobilizing Large Numbers and doing it “Grass Roots” – unprecedented fundraising success by generating large numbers of small donations rather than small numbers of large donations to raise more than an estimated $600 million (McCain raised an estimated $250 million).

The Message Consistency – the message never waivered from the idea of being an “antidote” to the status quo.

But perhaps the most obvious and (to a techie like me) inspiring elements of witnessing this campaign was its focus on social technology to support and propel all of the other techniques.

The use of “new media” from friend building on Friendster to the seemingly simple text message proved to be a powerhouse for the campaign, as it extended the concept of “Team Obama” far beyond campaign headquarters literally into the hands of millions of Americans who voted and vocalized with their typing fingers.

For all the small business owners who couldn’t help wondering, wow – can I do that? My answer is Yes you can! (Sorry couldn’t help myself).

In taking a closer look, the technologies used form a rather familiar list:

• Official Web site: http://www.barakobama.com and http://my.barakobama.com
• Text messaging strategy – enabled via collecting phone numbers on a mass scale
• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/barackobama
• Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barackobamadotcom/
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/barackobama
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/BarackObama
• YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/BarackObamadotcom
• Meetup.com: http://barackobama.meetup.com/

The list reads like a “who’s who” of social media marketing.

But the real power in these technologies is understanding that the goal is not just to “set up” one tool or another, but to understand each tool’s potential. That potential in the Obama campaign was brought to fruition by:

• having a consistent message
• providing free and open access to “making a connection”
• *always* keeping the tool up to date
• providing pertinent digestible bytes of information that could be read, downloaded, passed on
• leveraging the sheer quantity of enthusiasts and supporters on each tool to disperse messages almost instantly across an unbelievably wide, new network of venues and communities that hasn’t been seen since the invention of television.

Think about the leverage that a database of 948,000 people on MySpace and 3.1 million people on Facebook provides when you have a message to communicate (and consider that vs. McCain’s 221,000 on MySpace and 600,000 on Facebook).

As you think about your business and consider the challenge to build brand, generate buzz and stay on the radar as a small business owner with limited time and a limited budget, there are some very simple lessons to learn here:

1. everybody needs a team. Whether you’re trying to build a team of millions of voters or a few thousand supporters of your business, build a team by building a venue for them to get involved. Even the simplest involvement can be powerful.

2. email, the Web, and cellular technology have created an unprecedented venue for that involvement. Know who should be on your team and know the different ways they like to be involved.

3. Use wisely. Learn how these technologies work and learn by example how they can be leveraged to build a community of supporters for you.

This is an advantage that won’t last forever. As businesses gain competency in these techniques and learn to invest wisely, these techniques will slowly become standards rather than competitive advantages.

But it is possible for a growing small business to build a strategic, cost-effective and impactful social media campaign. As “Team Obama” has shown – yes you can.

Another great article about Obama’s Viral Marketing in TIME MAGAZINE.

[via Inc Magazine] by Maisha Walker

CHICAGO (AP) — President-elect Barack Obama says he wants to make the White House “green.” In an interview with Barbara Walters, Obama said he plans to sit down with the chief usher for the presidential mansion and do an evaluation of its energy efficiency.He says part of what he wants to do is show the American people that it’s not that hard to go green.

Asked whether he’ll be tiptoeing around at night, turning off the lights, Obama said he isn’t going to be obsessive about it.

He says he doesn’t do that now where he lives and there’s no reason to do that in his new home at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

ABC provided excerpts of the interview, which airs Wednesday at 10 p.m. EST.

[via AP] by Sara Kugler

WIRED Magazine put together a great comparative of Obama and McCain’s policies that are important to their readers – here’s the wrap-up.

Topic Covered:

1. Broadband
2. H1B issues
3. Investment in green tech
4. Net neutrality
5. Spectrum

Broadband

The Issue: The United States is becoming a tortoise in a world of hares. One of the world’s most Wired nations a decade ago, we now lag behind most of our peers. In France, broadband access is half the price and four times as fast. The main cause for the debacle is a lack of competition in telecommunications. Most communities have, at best, one cable choice and one DSL choice. This situation came about through the mass consolidation of the industry, and through the non-enforcement and then repudiation of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which mandated that entrenched telecom companies lease their lines into people’s homes to smaller companies.

McCain’s Position: As argued here and here, McCain has consistently been on the wrong side of this issue. As Senate Commerce Chair, he supported the mass consolidation in the industry. He also consistently voted the wrong way on whether entrenched competitors should be forced to lease their lines. The one point in his favor is his support of the Community Broadband Bill which would help cities offer wireless Internet, even when the local companies try to crush them.

Obama’s Position: Obama wasn’t around for the major votes on this issue. And while he is advised by all the right people, he hasn’t come out with a specific plan to open up the industry. His big proposal is to take money currently used to subsidize rural phone use and, instead, use it to subsidize rural broadband use. This could be helpful. But if the markets aren’t made competitive beforehand, it could also end up as little more than another subsidy to the same giant companies that have served us so poorly.

Grades:
McCain: D
Obama: B

H1B Visas

The Issue: Many people skilled in technology around the world want to work in the United States, but it’s tough to get in if you don’t have a family member already living here. One good way to increase American productivity would be to increase the quota of skilled workers allowed under our H1B visa program. Opponents counter with mostly bogus concerns about spies and job loss for Americans.

McCain’s Position: Though his immigration policies shifted during the Republican primary, he has been a long proponent of allowing in more high-skilled technology workers. Here’s his plan: “John McCain will expand the number of H-1B visas to allow our companies to keep top-notch talent –- often trained in our graduate schools -– in the United States. The Department of Labor should be allowed to set visa levels appropriate for market conditions. Hiring skilled foreign workers to fill critical shortages benefits not only innovative companies, but also our economy. For every foreign worker hired, corporations generally hire five to ten additional American workers.”

Obama’s Position: Obama supports a temporary increase in skilled immigrants allowed here under H1B visas. But he doesn’t mention the issue in his technology plan. And, in interviews, he has hemmed and hawed about highly skilled immigrants taking jobs from Americans. In an interview with Michael Arrington, he said, that the country can “go a long way toward meeting industry’s need for skilled workers with Americans. Until we have achieved that, I will support a temporary increase in the H-1B visa program as a stopgap measure until we can reform our immigration system comprehensively.

Grades:
McCain: B+
Obama: C

Green Tech

The Issue: Technology is the best, and only way, to get us out of our environmental mess. Government’s best bet at solving this problem isn’t to pick and fund specific winners. Instead, it should try to create as fertile a marketplace as possible, while ending subsidies to dirty technologies. Five-dollar gas, after all, is good for clean tech.

McCain’s Position: McCain talks loudly about green technology, but he carries a small stick. He wants to invest $2 billion annually for research into clean coal, and he wants to offer a $300 million prize for developing an advanced battery technology. Like Wired, he does strongly support nuclear power.

Obama’s Position: Obama’s stick is bigger. He calls for an investment of $150 billion over the next decade in clean energy. He wants to extend tax credits for clean energy producers, and he has proposed an annual 410 billion investment in a Clean Techhnology Venture Capital Fund. Like McCain, he favors a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions. Unlike McCain, his supporters don’t chant “drill, baby drill” at his rallies — suggesting that he’ll be less likely to extend the subsidies to oil companies that have played such a big role in limiting green tech. It no surprise that the green guys love him.

Grades:
McCain: B
Obama: A

Net Neutrality

The Issue: The question here is whether the telecom companies can pick and choose what they send over their pipes. Without a regulation mandating that the pipes remain open, Verizon, for example, could decide to start messing with your Vonage or your Bittorrent.

McCain’s Position: According to his technology plan “John McCain does not believe in prescriptive regulation like ‘net neutrality.’” He does however support the notion that technology companies should voluntarily proclaim their support for “freedom of access to content.”

Obama’s Position: Here’s the first specific point in his technology plan: “A key reason the Internet has been such a success is because it is the most open network in history. It needs to stay that way. Barack Obama strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.”

Grades:
McCain: D
Obama: A

Spectrum

The Issue: Spectrum is the technological equivalent of the roads over which our technology travels. Right now, clunky companies that use oxcarts own many of the widest highways. Meanwhile, tiny alleys—like the 802.11 band—are used for rampant innovation, like everything that uses WiFi. Soon the government is going to have a choice over whether (and how) to auction off extremely valuable, and fast, spectrum: the unused bits in between broadcast TV channels one and 52. Google and other most other tech companies believe that the spectrum could be the basis for a future of super-fast wireless communication. The broadcast companies naturally want to keep it in their top drawer. Joel Osteen is terrified that his sermons won’t come through cleanly if the spectrum is auctioned off.

McCain’s Position: McCain has, sensibly, long opposed giving away the airwaves. “They used to rob trains in the Old West. Now we rob spectrum,” he once said. He initially helped push through the last big spectrum auction, and he takes a strong, positive stand in his platform: declaring that we should “auction off inefficiently-used wireless spectrum to companies that will instead use the spectrum to provide high-speed Internet service options to millions of Americans.” The bad news is that he hasn’t said anything good on spectrum since the beginning of the primaries. He didn’t push for rules that would mandate competition over the last batch of spectrum auctioned off. He is also worryingly close to (and almost always sides with) the telecom industry, which is packed with spectrum offenders.

Obama’s Position: Obama has stated vaguely that we should review our spectrum policies and look for opportunities to open more up. But he has been reluctant to take a stand on the white spaces, perhaps because he fears a fight with the National Association of Broadcasters. He did, however, take a very good position in his interview with Arrington, declaring his support for all the right goals and then specifically criticizing the most recent auction. “We must make sure the nation’s airwaves are licensed to maximize their public benefit. Auctions have most recently been conducted without sufficient incentives to encourage full use and competition.” Perhaps partly because of this — and partly because he seems generally more tech savvy — employees of the companies that want to open up and use the white spaces massively favor him.

Grades:
McCain: B
Obama: B

[via WIRED] by Nicholas Thompson