On March 1 Robert Gibbs, a severely overweight man, uploaded a video to YouTube and went viral almost immediately. Within twenty-four hours of uploading the video, Robert had about 200,000 YouTube hits, calls from news stations around the globe, and even calls from weight loss guru Chris Powell and Dr. Phil’s team—all thanks to YouTube.
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President Barack Obama’s claim as the first “Web 2.0 president,” along with his ties to the tech industry, may be getting a little deeper with rumors of two impending personnel moves between his presidency and Silicon Valley.
The @PressSec Twitter account is back in business, now in the hands of new White House press secretary Jay Carney, who took it over from his predecessor, Robert Gibbs, Yahoo! News’ The Cutline reported.
Carney kicked off his tenure on Twitter with this Tweet, sent late Monday morning:
Ok, let’s turn this machine back on. Jay Carney here, send your Qs my way and I’ll answer a few soon
The Republican-controlled 112th Congress was the subject of the most news links shared by bloggers, while the Twitterverse was enthralled with Apple for the second consecutive week, and the most-watched news and politics video on YouTube was BBC footage of polar bears playing with hidden “spy” cameras, according to the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s New Media Index for the week of Jan. 3-7.
A total of 32 percent of bloggers’ news links focused on the new Congress, followed by: the death of actress Anne Francis, at 18 percent; a BBC audio interview with openly gay actor Rupert Everett about the problems homosexuals face in the film industry, at 10 percent; White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs leaving his post to help direct President Barack Obama‘s re-election campaign, at 9 percent; and a story in USA Today about thousands of red-winged blackbirds falling dead in an Arkansas town on New Year’s Eve, at 7 percent.
Apple, particularly reports that the company’s value topped $300 billion, was the subject of 20 percent of Tweeted news links, followed by: a TechCrunch column predicting seven new technologies that will “rock” in 2011, at 10 percent; Twitter at 6 percent; Skype’s acquisition of video streaming service Qik, also at 6 percent; and social-networking site Quora, at 6 percent, as well.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs dove head-first into Web 2.0, accepting questions for a press briefing via Twitter and answering some of them in a YouTube video, ReadWriteWeb reported.
His Tweet read, “Something new. You take first crack. Use #1q in a q & I’ll answer 1 on vid before today’s briefing. What do you want to know?”
ABC News blog Political Punch is celebrating its fifth birthday Wednesday, having started out under the title Down and Dirty, and senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper marked the milestone with a blog post reflecting 60 months and more than 7,600 posts later. Highlights:
“Today it begins …” was that first post’s title. And it began: “Yo. Today begins the grand abc news blog experiment. Blogs being built on spontaneity and opinion — neither of which big mainstream news organizations are particularly known for — but we’ll see how it goes … ”
Since then, “Down and Dirty” (as the blog was then called) became “Political Punch,” and a host of co-contributors joined in — Sunlen Miller, Karen Travers, Ann Compton, and many others. We’ve posted more than 7,600 items. For the first several years, the readership was so sparse I could post a picture of my cat as a lark and few would notice.
There have been some misfires, to be sure (all of which were my fault), but for the most part, I think (I hope) Political Punch has worked pretty well in allowing us to enhance our TV reporting with greater context and more information, to report news as it happens and break stories as soon as we have them confirmed (rather than waiting until the next show up), and to share with you information and observations that don’t rise to the level of needing to be reported on TV but may interest you nonetheless. (From that first week: the smell of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, for example, or the process of reporting a World News piece.)
