The launch of the official White House iPhone app was announced on the White House blog late last night by the White House's chief developer. There few parts of that sentence that wouldn't have seemed a little crazy a year or so ago.

That aside, what's in the new White House iPhone app? If you have a minute and a half, take a look at the video to the right for quick rundown of what the app features.

If you don't have that long, keep reading...

The New York Times' John Harwood makes the intriguing suggestion that the Internet is, in part, to blame for Barack Obama's less than stellar poll numbers of late. The argument is that because of the fractured nature of the modern TV-Internet-mobile media sphere, team Obama hasn't been able to get much use out of the agenda setting tricks of past administration's. That wouldn't be too much of a problem if (a) the Obama Administration didn't insist upon such energetic multi-tasking that only serves to confuse reporters and (b) the public didn't still expect the American presidency to set the public agenda, and regard an inability to dominate the news cycle with a coherent message -- a la the broadcast era -- as a sign of a weak, directionless presidential administration. Your move, Obama White House:

Ever since Mr. Obama took office, critics of his leadership style have accused him of tackling too many initiatives at once. That blurs the focus of the White House and Congress, they say, and prevents the president from communicating a clear theme about his agenda to ordinary Americans.

Now, as Mr. Obama’s approval rating in polls has dwindled to 50 percent or below, that criticism has grown louder.

“It is a very real problem,” said a Republican pollster, Jan van Lohuizen, who advised President George W. Bush. “Not just that attention is scattered, but the message is scattered as well.”

But that case, 11 months into Mr. Obama’s presidency, remains unproved. On health care and climate change, at least, he has drawn closer to achieving his goals — and challenging accepted notions of how modern presidents communicate and lead a polarized, fragmented country.

“I used to firmly believe that the bully pulpit only had one microphone,” said Mike McCurry, White House press secretary for President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s. “But in the age of new media, that’s probably changed. There is one ‘conversation’ in the mainstream media at any hour, but there are hundreds of them coursing across the Web.”

You get the sense that this is a story driven by complaints from inside the big white house. White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer concedes that the Internet has him scratching his head about what "communications" means any more:

"There have been fundamental shifts in how people consume news and information," said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. Among his most urgent tasks, he added, was "cracking the code."

Question: Why is what appears to be the only photo on the White House Flickr feed of Obama interacting with guests at the India state dinner this one?

Being on the road seems to agree with this White House. During this week and last's Asia trip, the Obama White House has done two things more savvily then they've generally managed to pull off thus far into the Administration. And they both hearken back to what worked for Obama during the campaign; indeed, there are real echoes of candidate Obama's swing through Europe and the Middle East last summer that peaked with his giant rally in Berlin. First, on this Asia trip, team Obama has drawn an explicit connection between connective technologies and political values. And the second is that, in contrast to a sometimes dry and bureaucratic new media outreach approach of the early Obama Administration, they're focusing again on humans, on passions, on emotion and the flesh and blood of politics that people seem to find particularly appealing...

CARS.gov, the Department of Transportation's online home for its Cash-for Clunkers program, has posted the raw data on the nearly 700,000 cars that were traded in during the course of the month-long program. (via Paul Blumenthal)

There's an interesting subtext here that goes beyond a simple government data dump. Cash for Clunkers one of the financial revitalization projects that the Obama Administration is most desperately interested in having the public embrace as a proactive, forward-thinking, and innovative solution to a sticky economic problem. Cash for Clunkers is one simple, voter-friendly victory the Obama White House thinks it can reliably point to as evidence of its vision. What the Obama White House and the extended executive branch are really worried about is that what they see as the enormous success of the problem dies a death of a thousand cuts, slowly weakened by the blog chatter and other online doubting that "Clunkers" has attracted, particularly from conservatives. That accumulation of doubt is potentially as damaging as a direct hit, and the Obama White House sees Cash for Clunkers as an ally whose reputation it has to protect with all the tactics it knows.

That's why we see the White House blog going toe-to-toe with the automotive website Edmunds.com, not traditionally considered a worthy sparring partner of the President of the United States. Think of it as a "broken window theory" approach to the new media environment. And that's why we see the Secretary of the Treasury himself high-fiving the White House blog for challenging Edmunds' analysis of the utility of the clunkers program. "A big 'Thank you' to the White House blog team for a witty and perceptive account of Cash for Clunkers' real contribution to our economic recovery," blogged Ray LaHood.

Someone intimately familiar with the White House's thinking on its approach to the new media environment explained why the Obama Administration is pursuing such a tactic. Part of what makes the Internet valuable to the Obama operation, the thinking goes, is that suddenly the White House isn't quite so utterly dependent on the traditional press' interpretation of what the White House is up to on a day-to-day basis. Administration officials aren't so limited to giving a reporter a quote or delivering an answer at a press conference and then seeing what the mainstream media makes of it. That's appealing to an Obama White House that, like many White Houses, is skeptical of just how good the press' intentions are. The web doesn't just offer the benefit of spin. The Internet's environment of abundance and direct connection to its audience means that the White House can not only put out information into the new media ecosystem, back it with heaps of background materials, and then attach to it its own meaning of that data, or quote, or new policy change.

Take White House ethics watchdog Norm Eisen's recent blog post on the release of the White House visitor logs that contain the names of such politically-charged visitors as the minister Jeremiah Wright and the filmmaker Michael Moore. But with the podium of the White House blog, Eisen can not only make those records public but also craft what the White House thinks is the proper interpretation of them. There's less of a need today to rely on professional reporters to see things accurately, or to handle nuance correctly.

When Eisen released the first batch of the White House visitor logs, for example, he offered instructions on how to interpret the new abundance of information the White House was releasing into the world. "Given this large amount of data, the records we are publishing today include a few 'false positives' -- names," like those of Wright and Moore, "that make you think of a well-known person, but are actually someone else." When it comes to Cash for Clunkers, the Obama Administration also isn't taking any chances. Alongside the XLS and CSV files that the administration hopes will be used to bolstered its case about how successful Cash for Clunkers was is a "Note to Analysts" with helpful instructions on how to best make sense of the new information. (Photo credit: ThreadedThoughts)

When David Almacy, the White House Internet and e-communications director from 2005 to 2007, was taken by the Obama White House's new media director to a courtesy lunch in the White House mess at the start of the 44th president's term, it marked one of the very few times that the veteran of the Bush Administration had eaten in the West Wing's in-house cafeteria. That's because, says Almacy, "you have to be senior staff to have privileges to the mess." With refreshing frankness, Almacy describes his own status in the White House hierarchy as distinctly "mid-level management." So for the Bush White House's Internet director, it was the mess' take-out window. You could buy coffee and the like there, he says. But you have to pay for it on the spot.

In a wide-ranging conversation (from which I'll have more shortly), the now-Senior Vice President at Edelman used Obama White House new media director Macon Phillips' running tab in the White House mess as a demonstration what he sees as the considerable upgrade to the status of new media in the Obama White House. Almacy chalks up the boost to both committed leadership and the transformative change that becomes possible when a new gang comes into town.

In the Bush White House, Almacy had one dedicated staffer working under his direction. Eight or nine independent contractors handled the White House's needs when it came to programming, design, and video. Phillips, a Special Assistant to the President, has a dedicated team, a budget, and a desired place in the White House universe -- as a freestanding unit within the White House Office of Communications. In Almacy's day, the Internet was considered niche media. Online outreach was slotted under the Office of Media Affairs, alongside local cable TV news and the specialty press, like when ESPN covered the Super Bowl champion's visit to the White House. Phillips' shop is considered its own special hybrid team, a direct conduit between the White House and the country.

UPDATE: On the off chance you don't read "Fast Lane," the blog of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood, here's a pointer to a post in which he gives a high five to the White House for getting his back against Edmunds on Cash for Clunkers. Pile on!

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The White House blog has been going after Edmunds. Who's that?, you're asking yourself. Noted conservative thinker John Edmunds?* No, no, it's Edmunds.com, the automotive website where you can look up the value of a used car or get some advice on what you should drive next. The site, whose CEO Jeremy Anwyl has been a critic of the Cash-for-Clunkers program since this summer, just released an analysis that found that many of the cars traded in during the program would have been traded in even if the program had not existed. The White House was not pleased, and in a post on WhiteHouse.gov by new media director Macon Phillips, it made that clear:

On the same day that we found out that motor vehicle output added 1.7% to economic growth in the third quarter -- the largest contribution to quarterly growth in over a decade -- Edmunds.com has released a faulty analysis suggesting that the Cash for Clunkers program had no meaningful impact on our economy or on overall auto sales. This is the latest of several critical “analyses” of the Cash for Clunkers program from Edmunds.com, which appear designed to grab headlines and get coverage on cable TV. Like many of their previous attempts, this latest claim doesn’t withstand even basic scrutiny.

Silicon Alley's Joe Weisenthal is of the opinion that the White House blog's pointed critique of Edmunds.com over Cash for Clunkers, a program that has run its course, makes the Obama White House look thin-skinned. (A variation on the word "stupid" pops up in Weisenthal's post.) The White House new media operation is in some ways a strange hybrid. Organized in the White House hierarchy as part of the White House communications team, it seems to be using its innovative blog here as more or less the online component of the traditional White House press operation -- albeit with a more bloggy, calling-folks out-by-name feel to it. Smart? Inappropriate? Inevitable, given the flattened way media works today where information flows from sources traditional and otherwise? You be the judge, and let us know in the comments.

*Note: Not an actual person. (Photo credit: ThreadedThoughts)

Publisher, conference convener, and lover of animal pen drawings Tim O'Reilly gives us his insight into how the White House just switched from a proprietary content management system whipped up by a federal contractor to one based on Drupal, the free and open source software made by the Internet. Or, more specifically, by people who spend a lot of time on the Internet and like to make and give away software.

There are three things about O'Reilly's analysis that pop out in particular. Consider this fair warning: the first is really, really technical, at least for 98% of the population. O'Reilly gives word that the White House will be using an implementation of Drupal that makes use of what is called the LAMP stack in softwarese. The "L" is for Linux, the open-source operating system. (It'll be of the Red Hat variety, says Tim.) The "A" is for the Apache web server software package, itself open source. Because you're getting the hang of this and realizing we're dealing with an acronym here, we'll just say that rounding things out are MySQL for database stuff and either Perl, Python, or PHP for a programming language. (The trouble with acronyms, perhaps.) The search engine on the site -- on of the very few things that actually might look different to mere mortals post-switch -- is based on Apache Solr. That's a chunk of code that the CNET Network thunked up and then passed back to the Drupal community. That practice of share and share alike is one of the things that makes the open source software movement so special.

Which is, coincidentally, just about the perfect set up for the second thing that jumps out of O'Reilly's post. (Don't worry, this one is understandable for even layfolk.) When the White House's switch to Drupal will really get jazzy and exciting, says O'Reilly, is when...

The White House has taken a considerable and potentially likely lasting step towards greater governing transparency by, under pressure from the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW), agreeing to establishing a system and practice for releasing the Secret Service's visitor logs of who comes to visit the White House. That's good. What's even better: the White House has affirmed that making these records "public" doesn't mean printing them off, packing them in acid-free boxes, and dropping a copy at the National Archives. Instead, they'll be posting them online directly from the Secret Service's WAVES and ACR systems. The schedule they've laid out is relatively timely, with monthly posts of records that are 9o to 120 days old, though more on that below. There doesn't seem to have been talk of data format, but let's hope for something structured and both human and machine readable...

President Barack Obama used the first segment of this week's weekly video address to "debunk some of the more outrageous myths" about health care reform, before segueing to a morality-driven call to make this "the moment we earned our place alongside the greatest generations."