Obama: "America's First Online Social Networking President"

From Wednesday's Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/30/AR2008123003518_pf.html

"With some notable exceptions, federal Washington -- how agencies deal with citizens, the process in which policies and laws are created -- is stuck in the Encyclopaedia Britannica era. A relatively small group of editors and contributors is in charge. A growing portion of the country, however -- the Web-enabled set that swears by MySpace and YouTube (and note the emphasis on "My" and "You") -- lives by the wisdom-of-the-crowd, I-have-something-to-contribute ethos of Wikipedia.

In the same way that anyone can edit a Wikipedia entry, not only will Web-acculturated citizens speak their minds, but they also won't ask anyone's permission to do so.

It has been only a decade since an American president first used the Internet. In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration created WhiteHouse.gov and ordered all federal agencies to get online. For the first time, the government used the Web to describe what it was doing in its own terms, bypassing media middlemen. George W. Bush's two terms brought podcasting, online chats and videos to the presidency's online presence."