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Clinton's First Internet Address To The Nation
gumbo writes: "President Clinton gave his first
Internet Address to the Nation today, in RealVideo, RealAudio,
and Sun .au (!) formats. He also
announced
a government-wide search engine that should be up by fall, with
no funding from tax dollars.
Personally, I run several government Web sites and haven't heard of
this, so they must be planning on spidering *.gov without checking
with us first. :)" It may be a e-bucketful of hype, a content-impaired pandering gesture, but some president would make the first such address, so why not Bill? As Internet connections become ever more ubiquitous, though, just how ubiquitous do we want the promised e-government to be?
Visit the National Security Agency's website!
The NSA: Get to know us as well as we know you.
One may wonder whether "government" as we view it is going to be relevant any more. Many countries are developing independent specialised institutions tasked with specific objective (which frankly politicians have shown to be incompetenet at managing). Look at the independences of the Fed. If Greenspan got run over by a truck, there would be a bigger economic shake down than if the president got assassinated (good for a few weeks of prime time). When the head of a country gets to become a figurehead with empty public posturing, who has the *real* control of a country?
What are some of the trends that could influence the future?
- social activism motivated by fast communications
- breakdown in the sense of national identity, perhaps not in the US where patriotism is still a saleable item but in other countries
- inefficiency of public owned services compared with private, to be revealed even more
- where some companies outmass entire countries in resources
To bring home the point, do people think of themselves as hackers first or [insert favourite home nation]?
LL
First off. Being a liberal hater doesn't necessitate one have any particular skin color.
The last time I checked J. C. Watts and Rush Limbaugh had VERY different skin colors. Both are staunch conservatives. Please quit propagating the great lie.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Too clueless to use MPEG, or too clueful? MPEG is still caught up in patents, licenses, and lawsuits!
;-)
That's not really a big deal in this case - to broadcast mp3 you need a one-off licence. Let's see Frauenhoffer try to gouge the Whitehouse! Mp3, even with its licence fees is far preferable to RealAudio, which is just a broken form of mp3. Both should have been supplied.
I was pleased to note that windows-media wasn't offered.
Where were you when all the previous stories about Ogg Vorbis were being posted?
I was there. In fact I'm on the vorbis devel mailing list. And have contributed.
I look into my crystal ball and see many oggs there.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
I also have this deep i'm-a-true-techie-this-hurts feeling when I see another lamer get a new Prefab. IBM clone and AOL. I dont feel bad because I'm jealous of their 1ghz Athlon, I feel bad that the market dictates what goes and what dies off...
Hmmm...interesting so instead of the companies that create technology that is easy enough for the average person to use (e.g. Dell, AOL or MSFT) we should force everyone to either learn how to use bash, Emacs and lynx so that your idea of cool tech is preserved?
Many people don't know the difference between .gov and .com. The domain name first.com is taken, but firstgov.com was free as a backup address for the clueless.
You may remember that whitehouse.com was taken by a porn site.
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Actually, this isn't entirely new.
...)
The website http://www.fedworld.gov/ offers a single search site for hundreds of federal websites. Originally started as a central BBS that let you look at other government BBS systems, it expanded into offerings via FTP and gopher before there was really a web.
Somebody also mentioned http://www.google.com/unclesam [no trailing slash: bad server config!]. (and get a load of the old glory colors on the Google logo: bet you see something similar on the home page by next weekend
Also, http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/Services/ has been around for a long time.
It sounds like http://www.firstgov.gov/ (which IS live, just a placeholder) will be much more citizen-oriented, that is, getting the services to the people (like Social Security or VA records), rather than being a spreadsheets and reports searching site. I just don't think it's a very good name. help.gov? helpdesk.gov? services.gov? something "nineties" like my.gov? (Somebody else said) first.gov? The repeated G-O-V is silly.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
I think the internet is going to change the democratic process in the future, but after MANY reforms. As of this moment, senators and such make vital decisions based on e-mail. Email has become a gigantic part of the democratic process.
I think that some sort of ID authentication process must come up in the next few years if official business will be done online. If they currently made a website for people to vote it would be "wildly inacurate". We must realize that the anonimity of the internet also attributes against the society democracy was built for.
I also have this deep i'm-a-true-techie-this-hurts feeling when I see another lamer get a new Prefab. IBM clone and AOL. I dont feel bad because I'm jealous of their 1ghz Athlon, I feel bad that the market dictates what goes and what dies off... But I also feel good that tech. is taking off, because it used to be an un-recognized tool of a "talented-tenth" of our society.
This "talented-tenth" still exists, but "normal people" also have the opportunity to explore the web.
As for the president eventually making speeches online, I think that's a great idea. If Nixon hadn't started speeches with TV, where would we be now? As long as we can confirm it's the president (becoming increasingly difficult with complex technology),
The democratic process will definately change during the next 30 years.
http://siokaos.org/
Why not just call it first.gov instead of firstgov.gov?
Wallace J. Lee
OK, my node-state has decided to bring back the institution of slavery. Anyone can sell themself, or their children, into slavery. The majority of the node-state's citizens have decided that this is a good idea. Any outsider who objects is a cultural imperialist.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The good news is that Clinton was clueful enough to give an address on the net. The bad news is, he's still too clueless to use mp3.
--
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Well, of course, it was actually Al Gore's idea. Everyone knows he invented the internet. And the microprocessor. And all of computer science...where do you think the word "algorithm" came from?
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You are in a twisty little maze of open source licenses, all different.
It's funny when NetCraft reports the site as "firstgov.gov is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98" when Reno is so up in arms about alternatives to Microsoft software.
Oh well.
-Kris
President Clinton gave his first Internet Address to the Nation today
Clinton now has first presidential post! I bet this pisses off Al Gore immensely (him "inventing" the internet and all).
About Inktomi
I'd guess that the firstgov.gov search engine will piggyback off Inktomi's existing search systems, so it will probably cost them less than building one from scratch. The interesting problems are getting more government material onto the net where it can be found.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Do you really think it's better to have only one search engine rather than additional ones like this new one, or usgovsearch.com, to cover more of people's needs?
Anyway, as someone who's been using the service for a while, I can tell you that it's as much of an index (think Yahoo) as it is a straight search engine (it does have a search engine, too, though). The fact that you can browse the index would be one reason why some people might prefer it to Google, which appears at first glance to just return a bunch of hits.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
If they develop a search engine and don't use tax dollars, how do they fund it?
Under the leadership of Vice President Gore...
...every on-line resource offered by the federal government...
...one-stop shopping for government services...
I can see already what this is about.
This new website, firstgov.gov, will be created at no cost to the government [much deserved snip] in 90 days or less. It will uphold the highest standards for protecting the privacy of its users.
Bill's quite quick on the uptake, you know? He has already mastered the art of vaporware. I envision a brave new world of E-Government(TM), where the irrelevant announcements of new Microsoft products and the pointless promises of politicians will go hand in hand!
Ah hah--now I see why it will be free, and take only 90 days to build. The http://firstgov.gov/ will simply be a big picture of the IRS's middle finger. But it will take three months for the Feds' first finger to figure out what their middle finger is doing.
Excuse me, Webmaster, what's the going rate on senators, and is it possible to buy one online?