Tag: BARACK OBAMA

The White House has announced that President Obama will hold a Town Hall meeting later this month, alongside Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company COO Sheryl Sandberg. The event, scheduled for April 20th, will be held at Facebook headquarters and live-streamed via the social network. You can RSVP on the White House Facebook page or submit your questions to the President here. ...

Ever wonder how all those insipid rumors about Barack Obama's citizenship became so ridiculously virulent? According to a recent study from researcher R. Kelly Garrett, e-mail is to blame. Blogs? Not so much. Though the Internet can expose us to a wider array of rumors, it can also expose us to a variety of counter-arguments, effectively neutralizing the blogsophere's rumor-mongering potency. ...

Last June, the Obama administration outlined an auction plan that could help double the U.S. broadband spectrum. According to Reuters, the White House has finally revealed the specific financial details concerning that strategy. As part of the overall plan, Obama will propose an additional $5 billion investment to bring wireless Internet to rural areas of the country. But, the spectrum auction ...

A guy named Sylvester Cann recently attended a rally in Seattle, where the POTUS was shaking hands and signing autographs. Somehow, Cann managed to work his way to within arm's length of President Obama, and soon found himself standing face to face with the most powerful person in the world. Instead of quaking in awe or mutely shaking the President's hand, though, Cann calmly whipped out his ...

Back in January, President Obama outlined a five-year plan in which all of the country's medical records would be digitized. By streamlining and introducing electronic standards to health data, mistakes like duplicate tests could be avoided. But, considering that only "20 percent of doctors and 10 percent of hospitals use even basic electronic health records," -- according to Kathleen Sebelius, ...

The White House just released its National HIV/AIDS strategy yesterday, and it ambitiously aims to reduce new HIV infections by 25-percent by 2015. How will it accomplish this goal? The plan outlines the use of more social networking, but not much new funding. According to the new policy, "The United States currently provides more than $19 billion in annual funding for domestic HIV prevention, ...

Can Lady Gaga be stopped? Self-marketing genius, living performance piece, fortuitous flavor of the month or some combination of the three, the Lady's rise to fame seems uninhibited by even bad press and a mediocre music video. You could argue that the world has reached its Lady Gaga tipping point, but the numbers would refute you. As we reported back in April, Gaga made YouTube history by ...

The Obama administration just keeps flexing its new media muscle and redefining what it means to speak to the people in a way that we haven't seen since the days of FDR's "fireside chats." The White House blog, its slick interactive website, weekly YouTube addresses and Twitter account are powerful, but they still feel like the tools of politics. A new White House video blog though, called 'West ...

One year ago this Friday will mark the one year anniversary of Data.gov, the Fed's repository for public databases and information that is the centerpiece of Obama's push for open government. When the site launched on May 21, 2009, it was home to 47 sets of data, and in the ensuing 365 days that followed, that number ballooned to more than 250,000. But one criticism that has persistently followed ...

Perhaps no other person in the world is kept under closer security than President Obama. His Twitter account, on the other hand... not so much. A small gap in Presidential security was publicly exposed Wednesday, as French police, in coordination with the FBI, arrested a man who'd successfully hacked his way into Obama's Twitter. The (not surprisingly) unemployed 25-year old Frenchman, who ...

In an effort to save money and gain support for health care reform, President Barack Obama is calling in the nerds. According to an Associated Press report, Obama said Tuesday that he's hiring a group of private "bounty hunters" to crack down on health care fraud, particularly those cases pertaining to Medicare and Medicaid. They won't be armed with mullets and pepper spray like TV badass Dog, ...

digg_url ='http://www.switched.com/2010/02/11/white-house-launches-report-card-on-government-openness/'; Yesterday, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra and Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra unveiled what they call the Open Government Dashboard, a sort of report card for government agencies and their abilities to meet objectives set forth in the Open Government Directive. The ...

If you're a political junkie with a tech obsession, you probably won't want to miss this afternoon's YouTube interview with President Obama. The interview will be streamed live by Citizentube, and the questions will be culled from over 11,000 submissions made by the Web-using public. The Q&A session will be the first post-State of the Union interview with the President, giving the citizens ...

We're sure, as responsible and engaged citizens, you're all planning to watch the State of the Union Address tomorrow. The annual event, in which the President recaps the government's accomplishments over the past year and lays out his agenda for the coming one, will be broadcast by all the major and cable news networks tomorrow night at 9 p.m. EST. But for those without a TV, there are other ...

In spite of its other perceived failures, the Obama administration has actually succeeded quite admirably at one of its promises: technologically ushering the White House into the 21st century. It has embraced blogging, streaming video, Twitter, crowd-sourcing, and has even created new positions within the government and armed forces that specifically deal with the challenges of running and ...