You Mean We Can Talk Back?

David Ho wrote for the Cox News Service last week: "Building on the president-elect's pioneering, tech-savvy campaign, his team aims to connect the incoming administration directly with citizens through Web sites, blogs and online social networks. . . .

"Looking ahead to a wired White House, 'our first priority is making sure that we keep the millions of people who played an integral role in the campaign engaged in the process,' Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. 'We also recognize now that we have a much larger audience to include: people who didn't vote or didn't vote for us.'"

The transition team yesterday posted a guide to comments: "The conversations among the online community on Change.gov serve two valuable ends, both of which will play a vital role for the incoming Obama-Biden Administration.

"Each discussion between the Transition team and readers provides rich insight into the issues and priorities Americans care passionately about.

"In addition, these disucssions [sic] also allow our team to provide a unique look into the work we do everyday and help make our jobs on the Transition as transparent and open as possible."

Within a few hours after the launch of the initial query, Micah L. Sifry, co-founder of techpresident.com, blogged on his site: "[T]his is a big deal. When you consider that for the last eight years, the occupant of the White House has essentially told the public 'you get input once every four years, after that I'm the decider,' this is huge. . . .

"Imagine what happens if those numbers -- on not just any 'centralized site' but the one that symbolically and perhaps literally has the attention of the President-elect -- start climbing into the five- and six-digits. Before our eyes, we are witnessing the beginning of a rebooting of the American political system."

Greg Elin blogs for the Sunlight Foundation: "For years, government web sites have avoided comments and third-party Web 2.0 tools for fear of confusing user contributed content with official content and violating various policy and compliance rules. What if a user comment posted dropped the f-bomb or stated inaccurate information about a government program? What if an embedded visualization did not conform to section 508 accessibility requirements?

"Yesterday, in one small blog post for a web site, but one giant web page for .gov web sites, Change.gov demonstrated how government sites could begin to join the rest of Web 2.0-kind."

Shailagh Murray and Matthew Mosk wrote in The Washington Post earlier this month: "The [Obama] campaign employed 95 people in its Internet operation, building a user-friendly Web site that served as a platform for grass-roots activities and distributed statements, policy positions and footage of Obama events. The White House Web operation will follow a similar but probably more ambitious path, transition officials said."

So far, the new-media move that has gotten Obama the most attention is the YouTube video version of his weekly "radio address." But as John Dickerson wrote earlier this month for Slate, that should not be confused with "an exercise in transparency. . . .

"Finding new ways to sell your message is not the same as making yourself more transparent. In fact, obscuring the message with shiny distractions may actually undermine the cause of transparency."