In the Spirit of the Week
In the spirit of the week, with President Obama’s inauguration on Tuesday, I decided to write a post in the same theme, but with a twist. This isn’t about Obama’s web campaign or the extreme numbers of Facebook and Twitter updates or how important it is to blog, it’s about how the White House is keeping up with the growing pace of the web.
Simply put, the White House has a Web site. And, over the last 12 years, it has changed to reflect how people use the Internet. Now you can read blog posts, watch videos, view slideshows, read agendas, study the history, learn about the administration, search for information, receive email updates and more. But it wasn’t always this way.
In an article from ReadWriteWeb, you can actually see how the site looked when it was originally designed. Which, I think is pretty cool. It’s hard to remember that the Web was not always critical to campaigns and the political world. It also teaches us an important lesson. You must always keep your site fresh and up to date.
President Obama and his new media director are making sure that the White House Web site is keeping up with today’s popular web trends, from structure to design to communicational tools, like podcasts and RSS feeds.
The latest word? He gets to keep his Blackberry.