Wait. Did I just post something called "finally: a White House that understands science, technology, and the Web"?
Turns out, maybe not so much.
I learned via Avedon Carol at Sideshow that the White House Web site, which was relaunched yesterday at noon, as Obama was being sworn in, appears to have flushed the records of the entire Bush administration down the memory hole. Click on any link to the White House site in any post at any blog that has been underlining the crimes and misdeeds of the Bush adminstration -- like the link to Bush's last news conference, in which he said something horrifying about how bad a state our economy may well be in, which Tom Engelhardt highlighted at TomDispatch.com -- and this is what you get:
Are they kidding? Are they kidding?
As Avedon Carol notes at Sideshow:
So the net-savvy Obama administration has just killed all of our existing links to the official history of the Bush administration. Dammit!
If that material is still there at all, it's certainly not accessible. As a test, I searched on "Guantanamo Bay," and in return I got a biography of Edith Roosevelt! And that's it.
Farhad Manjoo at Slate noticed this, too:
To test out the new site's search engine, I typed in "Bush." I got back just four pages dedicated to the clan--one bio each for Barbara Bush, George H.W. Bush, Laura Bush, and George W. Bush. That last page recounts the 43rd president's achievements in just a few short paragraphs--it says nothing about Iraq, Katrina, Gitmo, Scooter Libby, Alberto Gonzales, or anything else you might've lost sleep over these past eight years. It's almost like none of it ever happened.
This is bad. This is inexcusable. The Obama Web team cannot possibly have been ignorant of what they were doing. Which means they did it deliberately. And yet I can't even imagine the reasons they could have for doing it deliberately.
And so it begins...
Well, it's a valid question. People just have differing degrees of optimism about what the answer is. :)
For the heck of it, I used the whitehouse.gov contact form to ask them what their plan for the old material is. Be interested to see what answer I get.
Because there's *eight years of Web history* that links to it! The usefulness and completeness of that commentary has now been reduced. And I really, really would never have imagined that an administration that won on the basis of promising change over the last eight years would have wanted that to happen.
I mean: Put a frame around the old material and explain that it's from the Bush years. Or keep the old material in place and build the new site next to it. Or, at the very least, if the material must be shuffled into some closet of an archive in some dark corner of the site, set up redirects so all that Web history doesn't get broken. It seems like a no-brainer.
This is government material produced with taxpayer dollars that is clearly not subject to any secret restrictions (since it was placed on the Web in the first place). This kind of material is generally not subject to regular copyright laws. (See here.) This is in no way a rights issue.
No answer from the White House yet. Given all the news stories about the technology problems they are having, I'm not surprised.
But the George Bush Library and the National Archives have recreated the old site.