Social networking for Ezam Tamils

Can Obama make the most of his Social networking cred?

It's no secret that social networking played a crucial role in President Barack Obama's emphatic victory in last year's US presidential election. But the grassroots online work done for the campaign was only a starting point for the far greater initiative now underway: to open the channels of communication between the Obama Administration and the people.

By the eve of his election to the White House, Barack Obama had amassed an online following of more than 3 million supporters between the Web's two largest social networks: Facebook and MySpace. By the time of his inauguration he had more than 4 million supporters on Facebook alone, and well over a million registered users on his own dedicated social network, My.BarackObama.

With so many people seemingly willing to help during the campaign, the challenge now is for the Obama Administration to mobilise these millions again, to affirm this new form of interaction between the government and its citizenry.

There have already been some hurdles. The Washington Post reported last week that staff on the President's new-media team, arriving at their offices ready for their first day on the job, were aghast to find that many of the available computers were running outdated versions of Microsoft Windows. Although this probably doesn't rank as high on the list of tech disasters as that experienced by former president George W Bush's staff, who arrived on their first day in 2001 to find many of their computer keyboards missing letters — which may help in accounting for some of Bush's more memorable oratory bungles.

All the President's Bloggers

Obama's aides appear to have taken swift action to address this gap. So many of them tech-savvy, blog-posting fanboy types themselves, they have turned the White House's outdated IT infrastructure into a burgeoning social media hub, a makeshift digital camp for the new Administration's campaign-hardened Web veterans.

The President's blog was activated and updated from almost the second he stepped into office, and his YouTube video addresses posted weekly are already drawing comparisons to president Franklin D Roosevelt's Depression-era radio sermons. However, it remains to be seen how Obama's online staffers will mobilise the millions of volunteers across the United States who dedicated their time during the campaign. These are the very same individuals being called upon now to put into action Obama's sentiments of collective responsibility.

What is clear however, is that despite some early misgivings, the Obama Administration is already beginning to make good on its commitment to transparency, and using the Internet as its main tool to do it. But in the age of the social networking profile, the webcam and the confessional blog post, there seems little other choice for a presidential figure said to embody the spirit of the times.

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இது ஒரு நல்ல உதாரணம். நமக்கு நன்றாகவே பயன் படும். நண்பர்கள் உறவுகளுக்கு யாழை அறிமுகப் படுத்துங்கள்.

Edited February 22, 200916 yr by esan