WhiteHouse.gov hits road bumps

The Washington Post ran this interesting piece this morning on the challenges (and stumbles) that the tech-savvy Obama administration has faced with WhiteHouse.gov.

Here are a couple examples:

Obama, for example, would like to send out mass e-mail updates on presidential initiatives, but the White House does not have the technology in place to do so. The same goes for text messaging, another campaign staple.

Beyond the technological upgrades needed to enable text broadcasts, there are security and privacy rules to sort out involving the collection of cellphone numbers, according to Obama aides, who acknowledge being caught off guard by the strictures of government bureaucracy.

And:

As [White House Director of New Media Macon] Phillips and his team are discovering, Obama is being held accountable for everything he’s posting (and not posting) on his site. On his first full day as president, he issued a memo on WhiteHouse.gov saying that the administration’s yet-unnamed chief technology officer will be charged with writing an “open government” directive that will outline how agencies and departments in the federal government will be more transparent and collaborative.

My first impressions of WhiteHouse.gov were that it looked too much like a campaign website and not enough like the president’s website. For example, how can the president have a blog (let alone one called the ‘Briefing Room,‘ ahem!)? Doesn’t that seem weird? And for some reason the presidential seal about half way down the homepage just looks goofy, not official.

Then again, I’m not exactly sure what the president’s website should look like.

The Washington Post article also mentioned this great tool from ProPublica called ChangeTracker, which monitors every change to the administration’s website.

What are your thoughts on the new WhiteHouse.gov now that it’s over a month old. What’s good and what’s bad?

jeremy.jacobs@digital-staging.thehill.com