The White House recently hosted a “Stakeholder Meeting with Physicians” as part of a healthcare policy debate. What made this debate different was that the debate was broadcasted on Facebook allowing the social network users to contribute to the discussion in a chat room format.
CNN did this with Facebook on Inauguration Day back in January as well. The White House called this initiative citizen involvement. ”An aide from the White House Office of Health Reform will also be keeping track of the chat and letting the participants in the meeting know what people are talking about,” stated The White House Blog.
The White House stated that there will be similar events like this broadcasted on Facebook in the future as well. Giving users the ability to be heard empowers them.
Sheperd Johnson is a Flickr user that 1,200 uploaded graphic images of Guantanamo Bay prisoners as comments on the White House Flickr photo stream. Yahoo! Flickr quickly removed the images and told Johnson that his images were gone forever. They offered him $25 as compensation and blocked all of his messages. Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield even called Johnson “a dick” for doing what he did.
Yahoo! VP of Customer Service Heather Champ told Johnson that his photos were deleted because he was considered a “spammer” for putting all the images as comments. Johnson’s account was also deleted without a warning. Champ also told Johnson that his images were way too graphic.
Johnson was doing this as a way to get attention over President Barack Obama’s support for a controversial bill that suppresses government torture pictures. To compensate for the lost images, Champ offered Johnson a Flickr Pro account and a $25 gift card.
Johnson then decided to contact Flickr founder Stewart Butterfield, who had left Yahoo! last year. After the jump is an e-mail conversation between Johnson and Butterfield. The e-mail from Butterfield calls Johnson “a dick” among other things.
As much as I like President Barack Obama, I must say that I agree with Microsoft Corporation CEO Steve Ballmer about his opinion on a new plan to impose higher taxes on companies with foreign profits. Last month, President Obama proposed a plan to restrict $190 billion in tax breaks for offshore companies.
From a simple macroeconomics standpoint, I believe that punishing companies that offshore “grunt work” hinders the expansion of the production possibilities curve for the United States. The proposed plan “makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” according to Ballmer. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”
The current U.S. tax rules for overseas profits is that companies can defer corporate rates as high as 35%, assuming that these profits remain invested overseas. President Obama believes that ending these incentives will promote companies to invest more in domestic jobs. The President also has a valid point.
Microsoft employs 95,029 individuals across the globe. About 56,552 are based in the United States. Due to the economy, the software giant had to lay off about 5,000.
What is your opinion on this situation? It’d be interesting to see what sort of discussion comes out of Ballmer’s opinion on the economy. Leave a comment when you have some spare time.
Earlier this week at the White House press briefing, several cellphones began to rang. The first phone belonged to John Gizzi and press secretary Robert Gibbs confiscated it. And then CBS’ Bill Plante’s phone rang and he stepped out of the room to take the call. Wow, these press guys are acting like they are high school kids again where Gibbs is the metaphorical teacher telling the kids to stop using their phones during class.
Late last month, the White House set up a Flickr account [Flickr link] for The White House. Pete Souza is the official photographer for these photos and they were licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. This means that anyone could reuse, modify, and redistribute the photos as long as the original photographer is given credit.
However commenters at the Electronic Frontier Foundation stated that government works cannot be copyrighted which is why the license has changed from Creative Commons. Now the photos are licensed as “United States Government Work.” The license links to the explanation on copyright.gov.
This is the first time that Flickr has had to create an official government license. When photos appeared from the Library of Congress, museums, and libraries, the license generally was “No Known Copyright Restriction.”
The White House is tweeting again! Just a couple of days after the White House launched a Flickr photostream, the President and the White House staff will be tweeting out transparent messages about what the government is up to. A MySpace White House profile has been launched too.
Before President Barack Obama took office, he was using a different Twitter account and had only updated it twice since taking the presidency on January 20. Now the White House is in the process of migrating his old tweets to the new account. The old Twitter account launched by the Bush administration has been disabled.
Why was it removed? Most likely for consistency purposes. The whitehouse user name is all used on MySpace, YouTube, and Flickr by Obama’s administration.
President Barack Obama loves his social media. This is why his campaign team set up a Twitter account, a Facebook account, and a blog on The White House website. Now The White House has set up its own photostream on Flickr. Above is one of my most favorite pictures from the photo stream. It has Obama and Biden practicing their putting skills on the White House lawn on a bright sunny day in D.C.
Earlier today President Obama hired Vivek Kundra as the first Chief Information Officer of the White House. Vivek is formerly the CTO of the District of Columbia, serving under Mayor Adrian Fenty. Kundra was hired to push for the expansion of making the White House more high-tech. Kundra will also oversee federal technology spending, information sharing between agencies, and monitor security and piracy.
Obama will also be responsible to “lower the cost of government operations,” according to the New York Times. Kundra was born in India and lived in Tanzania until age 11. After that he moved to Gaithersburg in Mayland. Kundra moved post city contracts on YouTube, made Twitter common in his office, and hopes to allow drivers pay parking tickets and renew driver licenses on Facebook.
Kundra’s website Digital Public Square offers information about crime, parking, tourism, free wi-fi spots around the area, leaf-collection schedules, and a widget with live-snow progress in D.C. Kundra launched a contest on the website in October called “Apps for Democracy.” Kundra hopes to help the White House save $2.6 million over what it usually costs to hire contract developers.
Kundra has a Masters of Science in information technology from the University of Maryland and was the assistant secretary of commerce and technology in Virginia.
