Once again, President Barack Obama will be taking questions from the Internet. Saying "inaction is not an option," Obama announced through a YouTube video that the White House will today host one of their special-blend online townhalls that mixes together Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and live video streaming on White House Live. The special guest? The president himself. The subject? What Americans are wrestling with when it comes to health care costs, coverage, and choice. Obama will field some of the questions plucked by his staff from the more than 450 YouTube responses to his announcement, as well as Twitter and Facebook feeds. Health care staff will reportedly be on hand to field stumpers, and the White House promises to follow up with some of the questions that they don't get to today. The event starts at 1:15pm EDT, but head on over to Facebook now to watch as they set the stage and prepare for the event. It's not entirely clear that they're aware that the camera is already on.

The White House is promoting today's online town hall by posting some of the YouTube video responses smack dab in the middle of the WhiteHouse.gov home page. Is that you, top left?

I read long and ridiculously legalistic oversight reports so that you don't have to, my friends. Seriously, can I get a raise? I know, the 91-bleeping-page "Analysis of Legal Issues Related to Structuring FDA Sentinel Initiative Activities" doesn't sound like something we'd care about here, where we have constant eyes are on the sweet spot at the intersection of technology and politics. But ooh boy, it is. Let me 'splain.

Back in May 2008, the Food and Drug Administration a handful of creative and forward-thinking sorts at the Food and Drug Administration launched a system called Sentinel. The problem that Sentinel is meant to solve is this: what public health officials know about how pharmaceutical drugs perform after they've gone to market ranks somewhere in between "abysmal" and "horrendous." At a recent meeting of the FDA Transparency Task Force, for example, a mother told the assembled officials that it was only after her teenage son died from complications from leukemia brought on by taking a drug to treat Crohn's Disease that she found out that the drug her son was taking tends to create blood cancers in young men.

What Sentinel would do, which would be groundbreaking, is to create a standard, a system, through which all that we know about drugs and medical devices that is locked inside electronic health records is extracted. With it, we might finally paint a picture of what drugs actually do out in the world. Think Google Trends for prescription drugs. The flip side, of course, is that unlocking the power of Sentinel also means unlocking some of the most personal information that a human being has -- information on their health. So the question that has been on the mind of Sentinel's advocates is, can we really build a system that respects patient privacy while unleashing the power of our collective electronic medical data?

In short, the answer is yes. At least, that's the finding of the above-mentioned report by outside legal counsel. You can stop reading here if your curiosity is satisfied with the short answer, or you can join me after the break for the nitty gritty...

Sometimes I like to imagine that there's some far off land where words scamper about like ponies. And somewhere in that magical land, there's some configuration of word/ponies that makes the subject of negotiations over legislative definitions of electronic medical recordkeeping into good blog fodder. But it's Friday afternoon, it's hot in my office, I don't live in magical pony land, and sometimes important stuff is just boring. So I'll make you a deal. You read the next short paragraph about how HHS is wrestling with the definition of how doctors and other medical providers qualify for "meaningful use" of electronic medical records and I'll reward you with a fun and uplifting video at the end. Deal?

Judging from Technorati's tracking of the use of the terms "obamacare" and "public option," the effort by Republican message-meisters and blogger-activists to frame the health care reform bill as a new version of "Hillarycare" (and thus defeat it) appears to be gaining traction, at least as a tag:

Caught on video: Barney Frank's (D-MA) response at a Dartmouth, Massachusetts town hall when asked by a woman in the audience why he supports "Nazi policies" like the Obama health care plan. Some members of Congress are loathe to offend constituents, especially with a video camera rolling. Then there's Barney Frank. He leads with "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" And then he gets blunt from there.

The political world is buzzing today with condolences and reminiscences of Senator Edward Kennedy, and we here at PdF add our respects.

It's going to be an interesting day to watch how the live web reacts to the news and shapes its importance. Here's what I'm seeing so far...

What has arguably been the most public part of Organizing for America's push to get health care reform legislation through Congress has been a project where they collect on video the personal stories of Americans who have strong feelings about changing the state of American health care, most often because they or a loved one has suffered medically or because they got caught up in an insurance mess. Sharing personal stories is one organizing technique honed during Obama campaign era that some organizers see as most applicable to what citizens across the country can do to pass Obama's legislative agenda in Washington.

Thus, "Light, Camera, Reform," Organizing for America's latest attempt to capture on the rich medium of video American stories about what's the matter with the health care in the U.S. A panel of judges that includes will.i.am, Rep. Patrick Murphy, and Charlie from The West Wing will pick the best 30-second YouTube submission. The chosen ad will then get a national television airing.

There was a time when Barack Obama was the number one most followed personage on Twitter, back during the campaign season, but after getting elected his staff seemingly let the account go fallow, to be overtaken by celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Ellen Degeneres.

Who are we? What are we thinking about or responding to or passionate about or interested in? On October 21, 2009, I gave a talk to NPR Weekend Edition and Digital staff, during their staff retreat. The topic was "Navigating the World Live Web." My goal was to look at how we can tell new kinds of stories from the intentional and unintentional data streams being created by millions of users of the internet. Or, to use Paul Simon's memorable phrase, "the way we look to us all." Here's the video:

Cross-posted at Huffington Post

Micah Sifry has written a widely discussed essay about the denuded Obama grassroots movement, touching on a broad range of issues, from the campaign team's exertion of top-down control to their missteps post-election to the myth-making and marketing of hope and change. There have been a couple of extended critiques and Sifry has written a series of follow-ups to address questions raised by his thesis.

I'd like to focus on one important aspect of the original essay, namely the motivating factor(s) behind Obama's grassroots support.