Clearing the Cache: But Please, No Jammies
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, July 1 2009
- Above is one of the few hundred video submissions for today's White House health care forum, this one on the feasibility of preventing a mass rush to a public option. This is the world we live in now: you can ask the American president a timely policy question without having to get out of bed.
- YouTube opens up call-to-action overlays.
- The Sunlight Foundation has launched what it's calling Transparency Corps. Devote a couple spare cycles to vetting earmark requests and other tasks that computers still need us humans to tackle.
- Prediction: social media leaderboards (i.e., displays of "top users" and the like like we used on Twitterslurp) are, for better or for worse, the next big, big thing.
- From yesterday at PdF, Facebook's Randi Zuckerberg responded to the nagging question of whether Mir Hossein Mousavi's Facebook profile is actually his own. "It looks like it's an official page," she said, "but...you know."
- The CIA website makes a clickity-clickity noise. (Thanks Shaun Dakin)
- Arne Duncan announces a new, simpler web-based FAFSA.
- Russia wants an international cybersecurity treaty. The U.S. isn't so keen on the idea.
- And New York Observer's Felix Gillette has a thought-provoking look at how the TV networks handled broadcasting the video of Neda Agha-Soltan's death. Said one exec: "By telling our viewers that it's on YouTube, anybody who is watching our broadcast could go and watch the video if they're so inclined."