On Tuesday, I noted that Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov, and pointed to the fact that it now had a blog.
The Christian Science Monitor has published a good analysis under the headline Hey - it's a brand spanking new White House website. This includes a note:
Full disclosure: As the director of the White House website during President George W Bush's first term, I was part of a similar exchange between the two teams eight years ago.
The CSM story also acknowledges what brings a crowd. It says:
Whenever we talked about Barney on the White House site, traffic soared. We can only imagine once President Obama gets his new dog — page views will go through the roof.
We think a video camera on Vice President Joe Biden's head, however, would be a wonderful holiday video.
Meanwhile, ReadWriteWeb has provided a historical view in Whitehouse.gov: Looking Back at 12 Years of the US President's Web Presence. The White House site was launched in October 1994, during the first Clinton administration, and helped motivate other world leaders to get something online. George W Bush's staff then moved it along without attracting too much controversy.
Obama's team may not be so lucky. It got off to a bad start by breaking loads of existing links, and by using WebTrends tracking code without making this clear to users. Also, while everybody loves YouTube, it may not be the best idea to serve WhiteHouse.gov videos from there. YouTube is owned by Google, which was one of Obama's contributors.
Finally, Econsultancy has compared the White House site with Number 10.
It's early days, of course. However, Obama has the chance to be the first US president to exploit the web to make a real impact on people, not just in the US but worldwide. Let's hope he uses it.
