Social networking Archives

Courtesy of the Atlantic Wire, here's video of Michelle Obama officially joining the Twitterverse:

Looking for the latest images from Government Accountability Office reports? Well, now you can find them on the photo-sharing site Flickr.

On Thursday, the agency announced that it joined the White House and NASA on the site. GAO's page features 36 images that can be viewed and downloaded. All are taken from GAO reports, including "causes and rate of rail accidents, 2000-2009" and "top 20 U.S. seaports by number of foreign seafarer arrivals, fiscal year 2009."

"GAO continues to seek out new, innovative ways to convey our findings," said Gene L. Dodaro, U.S. comptroller general and head of the GAO. "The images in our reports help tell the story of government accountability by making complex concepts and data more understandable. Our Flickr page will allow us to highlight selected images and share them more easily with Congress and the public."

When Dee Dee Myers became President Clinton's press secretary in 1993, there were 50 websites worldwide. By the time Dana Perino left her job as press secretary for President Bush in 2009, there were over 20 billion websites worldwide, said Frank Sesno, director of George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs. Sesno moderated a panel discussion with four former press secretaries sponsored by the university Monday evening.

The panel took place as President Obama's current press secretary, Robert Gibbs, wraps up his term. His last day is Friday when Jay Carney will take over the office.

Thanks to the Internet, people all over the country now have a say in what's happening, said Perino. The Wyoming native noted that while her grandfather can't get the New York Times delivered to his ranch, he can stay informed.

Yet, all this connectivity presents a challenge for the White House. For example, when a plane crashed in Long Island, N.Y., two months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Ari Fleischer, President Bush's press secretary from 2001 to 2003 took nearly five hours to brief the press, making sure to get all the facts correct.

"I made enemies in the press [that day]," he said, noting that the continuous news cycle amplified speculation over the cause of the crash at a time when terrorism was foremost in many peoples' minds -- without any word from the White House.

Perino admitted that she resisted social media at first, but now she has nearly 30,000 followers on her Twitter page. By comparison, Gibbs on his official page has just under 147,000 followers.

You can now become a fan of the Government Printing Office on Facebook.

On Friday, the federal government's printer launched a Facebook page "in an effort to continue to use social media as way of increasing transparency and engage with the public on the workings of [GPO]," the agency said in a news release.

Spokesman Gary Somerset said GPO recognizes that social media is how the world is increasingly communicating. "We already have YouTube and Twitter accounts and Facebook is another extension of the social media circle," he wrote in an e-mail. "These efforts complement GPO's longstanding use of digital systems to inform the public."

GPO plans to post announcements, press releases, agency job listings, photos and videos on its Facebook page. As of Monday afternoon, the agency had nearly 200 followers, with numbers rapidly increasing.

Egypt has gone dark. According to Renesys, a Manchester, N.H.-based company that monitors Internet routing data, the Egyptian government appears to have taken the unprecedented step of ordering service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet.

"Every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world," Renesys said in a blog post. "The Egyptian government's actions . . . have essentially wiped their country from the global map."

At 12:34 a.m. Friday in Egypt, Renesys said they observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. The company said this is different from what happened previously in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or in Iran, where the Internet connections were rendered painfully slow.

The blackout also appeared to extend to mobile phones. British Telecom provider Vodafone confirmed on their website that all mobile operators in Egypt were instructend to suspend services in selected areas of the country. "Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it," the company said.

And the fact that those in Egypt might not see reaction from the US government, which condemned the moves, was not lost on State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowely: "We are concerned that communication services, including the Internet, social media and even this #tweet, are being blocked in #Egypt," he wrote on the micro-blogging site late Thursday.

The White House official overseeing the president's transparency initiative stepped down last week to return to her teaching post at New York Law School, Obama administration officials said Monday. A replacement has not been named.

The departure of Beth Noveck, deputy chief technology officer, coincides with the second anniversary of Obama's landmark open government memo. The guidance the president released one day after taking the oath of office called for agencies to institutionalize public participation in policymaking, collaboration with outside organizations and a default setting for disclosing information.

On Monday, Office of Science and Technology Policy spokesman Rick Weiss said this of Noveck:

Beth has been a tireless advocate for opening the federal government to greater collaboration and public participation. She has helped to develop significant advancements in the administration's efforts to utilize technology to break down the barriers between the American public and their government. We are sorry to see her go, and wish her all the best in her next endeavors.

Government transparency advocates have applauded agency efforts to create plans for fulfilling Obama's open government vision but criticized agencies' follow-through. They argue White House leaders aren't doing enough to hold agencies accountable for failing to be transparent. And questions have arisen about Obama's personal commitment to the movement.

But activists seem hopeful that the administration will keep Noveck's post and appoint someone capable of filling her big shoes. Already the blogosphere is abuzz with suggestions for replacements, like these from the social network GovLoop:

-Andrew Hoppin, New York State Senate chief information officer
-Dustin Haisler, CIO for the City of Manor, Texas
-Clay Johnson, former director of the Sunlight Foundation's software development division
-Bill Eggers, director of Deloitte research, public sector
-Lena Trudeau, vice president of the National Academy of Public Administration; founder of the Collaboration Project, an independent consortium working to apply web 2.0 tools to solve the government's problems.

The Armed Services -- particularly the Navy and Marine Corps -- made the best use of Facebook in 2010 among government agencies, according to a new survey.

Facebook's Washington office in late December 2010 asked a handful of social media experts and fans on three Facebook pages (Congress on Facebook, U.S. Politics on Facebook, and Government on Facebook ), for their thoughts on which politicians and government agencies were the most Facebook savvy.

Respondents praised the Navy for posing interactive questions and responding regularly to wall comments. And they commended the Marine Corps for having close to 1 million followers, which is the most of any military branch.

Fans gave honorable mention to the Environmental Protection Agency; Veterans Affairs Department; and the Disability.gov page, which the Labor Department's Office of Disability Employment Policy administers.

Meanwhile, in a separate survey about Twitter, Washington Post readers rated NASA as their favorite government user.

The National Archives and Records Administration just opened a door to what the agency expects will become a sort of time capsule containing U.S. historical materials that future generations will be able to access irrespective of innovations in technology.

A prototype of Online Public Access, which launched Monday, lets average citizens, as well as scholars, gain more comprehensive information on holdings that already are online, including card catalogs, digital representations of some records and multimedia from the agency's homepage, Archives.gov. Results for keyword searches play up the article images to appeal to eyes more familiar with social media layouts, like Facebook pages.

Each query retrieves a list of relevant records, archival data about the records identified, the source of the data and the physical or Internet location where the records are viewable. Next year, the site will offer a tool that allows users to zoom in and pan across the online materials, say NARA officials. In the future, people will have the ability to tag records with context based on personal knowledge -- as well as access audio, visuals and personal papers from presidential library collections, agency officials add.

The Archives does not have the resources to post all of America's artifacts. NARA's holdings include papers that would encircle the Earth more than 57 times; about 93,000 movies; more than 5.5 million maps, charts and architectural drawings; roughly 207,000 sound and video recordings; about 18 million aerial photographs; nearly 35 million still pictures and posters; and more than 3.5 billion electronic records.

But the agency is working on a project -- dubbed the Electronic Records Archives -- aimed at digitizing all records in a way that will make them accessible to the public even if the Internet no longer exists.

White House officials earlier this month announced a plan to accelerate the $994.9 million ERA program. The government has spent $425.2 million on the concept since 2002, but hardly any agencies are using the system, federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said.

As of this month, 16 agencies are depositing electronic records at the Archives via ERA software, according to the latest status report. Under the expedited schedule, ERA will be the default conduit for transferring records by July 2011 and mandatory for agencies in 2012, the Archives says.

The Air Force has issued a warning on its internal website to troops not to reveal their location through social media tools, such as Facebook.

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the service is concerned about new features on sites such as Facebook and Foursquare that could show the enemy exactly where U.S. forces are located in war zones.

"Careless use of these services by airmen could have devastating operations security and privacy implications," read the warning, sent to senior commanders, according to AP. Commanders were asked to spread the word to troops.

The Army, which has the majority of the nearly 145,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, intends to issue a similar warning next week.

The Transportation Security Administration came under fire from Internet users on Nov. 17 for being too slow to moderate and post readers' comments onto its blog, a sign the site is being read closely.

An impatient reader, noticing that comments weren't coming through, posted to Reddit on Tuesday, "The TSA is censoring all comments on their blog. Do you think we hurt their feelings?"

Forbes' Andy Greenberg rode on readers' anger on Wednesday morning:

The fact that the TSA blog has seemingly blocked all comments on its best venue for defusing immense public anger over these new security measures seems especially disingenuous given that it's long had a "Delete-O-Meter" on the bottom right of the blog site. As a transparency measure, that plug-in is meant to offer a count of comments deleted by the site's administrator. It hasn't moved in the last twelve hours-it seems Blogger Bob is simply not approving new comments, rather than flat-out deleting anything.

That nudge just might have prodded the site's Blogger Bob into action. A flood of comments -- mostly rabid rants -- went up late Wednesday afternoon.

The site has become a vibrant roasting platform for the agency, which has come under scrutiny for its security screening procedures and full-body scanners. The traffic and chatter climaxed with the surge of media interest around the TSA oversight hearing on Wednesday.

A post that went up as a forum for readers to "comment on things that are way off topic with the current post" amassed more than 605 responses in a day. Blogger Bob's patient explanation of why "opting-out of advanced imaging technology and the pat-down doesn't fly" prompted more than 350 comments in two days.

Not content with just the official blog, readers have found other creative ways to satisfy their anger. Rogue TSA Twitter accounts have mushroomed online, including "Agent Smith" of the handle @TSAgov, who tweeted today,