Barticus

Excellent! The new Obama administration has issued a memo to all gov’t agencies, instructing them to take “affirmative steps” to make information public, and to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure”.

This is in contrast to the standing policy from Ashcroft instructing agencies to “disclose information only after considering all possible reasons to withhold it”.

If you ask me, this is a very good thing.

More info available frm the Electronic Frontier Foundation here: On Day One, Obama Demands Open Government

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This is uber-nerdy, but I do think that (in a small way) it exemplifies what alot of us are hoping for in this administration:

http://www.kottke.org/09/01/the-countrys-new-robotstxt-file

For the non-web-devs out there, a site’s robot.txt file is an optional file that is used to tell search engines what parts of your site to include or exclude from its indexes. The previous administration’s robots.txt file consisted of a mind-boggling 2400 lines of exclusion rules. Here is the full content of the new Obama administration’s robot.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

The new administration has thrown open the doors for search engines to index the whitehouse.gov again!

I just used Advantageous MP3 for the first time to buy an mp3 — very sweet. I don’t think I’ll ever go back. Instead of buying the track from iTunes, I get a 256k, non-DRM’d mp3 for $0.89 from Amazon. Definitely check it out.