Winning Online

Today, Barack Obama held a town hall meeting - online.  The President accepted questions through Whitehouse.gov - which has been updated for the times in an almost bloglike fashion - and streamed the meeting through a video channel on the site.  Further interaction was set up so that users could vote on the questions submitted.  The highest voted questions would be answered on the stream by the President.

This is a show of Obama continuing with the technological, new media savvy that he and his campaign exhibited on the trail.  He and his administration took what is an older model of communication, the Town Hall Meeting, and applied it to a new model of communication, online video streaming and user interaction.  “We, the Media” had the chance to ask questions to the President much as the “real” media did in a Press Conference earlier this week.

Many pundits say that the President could be overextending himself, using up the valuable capital he walked into the White House with by being every where, all the time, in your face every time you look up.  But, this could really be an outdated argument.  In a techno world that we live in now, where folks constantly twitter, manage social media profiles on facebook and myspace, and “chat” continually through forums and personally through IMs and text messages, he may just be making himself a living embodiment of this momentum and of his times.  He is perhaps not trying to continually keep people’s fleeting attention, but taking part in the way people are having conversations: quick, regular, concise, constantly.