WASHINGTON — The White House said more than 64,000 people watched President Obama answer questions on Thursday in the first live Internet video chat by an American president. But in declaring itself “Open for Questions,” on the economy, the White House learned it must be careful what it wishes for.

More than 100,000 questions were submitted, with the idea that Mr. Obama would answer those that were most popular. But after 3.6 million votes were cast, one of the top questions turned out to be a query on whether legalizing marijuana might stimulate the economy by allowing the government to regulate and tax the drug.

“I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” Mr. Obama said, drawing a laugh from an audience gathered in the East Room, which included teachers, nurses and small-business people. “The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow the economy.”

The marijuana question later took up a good chunk of the daily White House press briefing, where Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, suggested that advocates for legalizing marijuana had mounted a drive to rack up votes for the question.

Those advocates included Norml, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which urged supporters to “let the president know that millions of American voters believe that the time has come to tax and regulate marijuana.”

But however the marijuana query rose to the top of the White House list, it provided one of the livelier moments in the mostly staid 70-minute event.

Mr. Obama did make a sliver of news, disclosing that he intended to announce in the next couple of days what kind of help his administration would give the auto industry. A senior White House official said no decision had yet been made; Mr. Gibbs hinted that the announcement would most likely occur on Monday.

“We will provide them some help,” Mr. Obama said, as he has in the past, while also talking tough, as he has done previously, by insisting that the auto makers would have to make “drastic changes” to restructure the way they do business.

Full article…

Obama Makes History in Live Internet Video Chat – NYTimes.com.

Last year, Leo Laporte became a Twitter quitter.

The host of one of Silicon Valley’s most popular podcasts was none too excited that of all the names in the world, the burgeoning message service had picked one that hit piercingly close to home. The online broadcasting network that Laporte owns and runs out of his house in Petaluma is called TWiT.tv, after his company’s flagship show, “This Week in Tech.”

The rise of Twitter has long been a favorite topic of conversation on TWiT, and with an audience of around 150,000, Laporte found himself in a strange pickle: The more he talked about Twitter on his show, the more followers he accrued — and the more publicity he gave his brand rival.

“I thought, jeez, I’m building value in this company that is ultimately vying for my trademark,” he said recently via phone. “So I left.”

But in spite of his absence, Laporte still became the most-followed user on the service, beating out front-runners like then-Sen. Barack Obama for the top spot, with more than 30,000 followers. Walking away from a megaphone that big just didn’t seem like good business. So he came back.

“They kind of have you,” said Laporte, who now has more than 100,000 followers on the service. “The same way that Facebook has you: because you have to go where the community is.”

Still, being in thrall to Twitter hasn’t stopped Laporte from joining a conversation that’s taking hold on the service’s fringes. As this group of Web subversives sees it, the once-tiny Twitter has grown like a magic beanstalk into a full-fledged communications medium — taking its place alongside Web pages, e-mail and maybe even television. And though the 30-person, San Francisco start-up is not exactly General Electric, digital trust-busters believe the same rules apply: One company shouldn’t have a monopoly…

…on an entire medium — even if it invented it.

“Those of us who are participating are pumping value into this closed system and trusting that Twitter will do the right thing with it,” said Laporte, referring to the tweets users pour into Twitter’s databases every day by the million.

People love the convenience and reach of social media systems like Twitter, he said.  “But what they ignore is that there’s a dark side to all of that, which is that these companies have a huge amount of control over what’s going on.”

Dave Winer, a Berkeley-based entrepreneur and Web innovator, sounded a similar note on a recent podcast posted to his Scripting News blog.

“It’s a very dangerous network because it’s all centralized,” he said, “not only on a technological level, where it goes through one set of servers — but it also goes through one set of business interests that’s anything but transparent.”

Danger may sound a bit overzealous for a Web service that barely existed two years ago, but for a media landscape in the middle of a profound shift, two years can be the span between eras.

Twitter is becoming a major source for news, commerce and free expression and, as with a free press itself, defenders don’t want a few profit-motivated individuals making all the decisions about how it should evolve.

Like Facebook and YouTube before it, Twitter is now transitioning from a freely available, much-loved Web service to a well-funded business venture looking to cash in on the audience and cachet it built in its freewheeling early days.

A few weeks ago, Twitter created a page of several dozen suggested users to help newcomers decide whom to follow. If you weren’t sure how to proceed, you can follow CNN, Lance Armstrong or Britney Spears. Being recommended by Twitter, it was quickly discovered, translated into tens or hundreds of thousands of new followers, and anointed accounts have since shot to the top of the Twitter hierarchy. The giant, instant audiences Twitter bestowed on these select users are thought to be so valuable that Web businessman Jason Calacanis offered Twitter $250,000 for a two-year ride on the list.

As visibility and influence gets funneled upward to the companies, celebrities and politicians that already have plenty of both, Twitter risks inviting a comparison to the overinflated economy — it’s creating a bubble at the top, and potentially alienating regular users who labored to build their audiences over months or years.

Well-known tech figures like Laporte and Winer don’t exactly represent the voiceless online rabble, but neither are they the types of guys you want leading a charge against you.

Winer recently wrote a post called “Why it’s time to break out of Twitter,” where he said of the service’s management, “we need to get that power out of their hands.” Laporte told me, “I’m more interested in seeing if we can go beyond Twitter — a more open system would be a better system.”

Complete article @

There’s Twitter the company, and twitter the medium | Technology | Los Angeles Times.

America’s New Shrink

Charles Ommanney / Getty Images for Newsweek

Therapist-in-Chief: The President explains the details of his $778 billion stimulus package to a crowd in Mesa, Arizona

If Ralph Waldo emerson had a 19th-century Facebook page, his “Favorite Quotation” (or maybe I should say my favorite Emerson quote) would likely be: “Events are in the saddle and tend to ride mankind.”

For the last six months, events have been in the saddle of the world economy and they might ride us for quite a while. Every day seems to bring bad news, with more on the way. Will commercial real estate crash next? Is General Motors toast? Dow 5,000, anyone?

When President Obama was sworn in, the stock market dropped. When he signed the largest economic recovery package in American history last week, the Dow plunged nearly 300 points. His widely panned bank rescue plan and even his better-received housing rescue plan both laid eggs on the Street.

Obama says he doesn’t worry too much about short-term market swoons, and he’s right not to. Who elected greedy gamblers to represent us? But the market is now based less on assessments of specific companies than on reaction to the federal government. And that reaction, cascading down to Main Street, is a fair reflection of the nation’s pessimistic mood. The new president is popular and refreshing, but still well short of transformative. For all of the legislative achievements of his first month in office, Americans have not yet had their faith in the future restored.

What’s a president to do? If he starts in with the happy talk, he sounds like John McCain saying “the fundamentals of the economy are strong,” which is what sealed the election for Obama in the first place. But if he gets too gloomy, he’ll scare the bejesus out of the entire world. The balance Obama strikes is to say that things will get worse before they get better, but that they will get better. Now he must convince us that’s true.

Conservatives smell blood. The Republican National Committee issued a press release saying Obama’s first month was all about “wasteful spending, failed bipartisanship and questionable ethics.” Columnist Charles Krauthammer called the $787 billion stimulus package “a legislative abomination,” and Karl Rove wrote that “the more Americans learn about the bill, the less they like it.”

Polls say otherwise. The public likes the signs of action, respects that the new president is willing to admit error and appreciates his constant reminders that there are no easy cures to what ails us.

Read full article…

Alter: Barack Obama, Bringer of Confidence | Newsweek Politics | Newsweek.com.

Giving your core product away is certainly an unusual business strategy, yet some succesful software companies are doing exactly that

If you went to your bank manager and said you had a great idea for a business in which you gave away your core product to your competitors, it is likely you would be instantly shown the door and not just because of the credit crunch. Yet this is exactly what some of the most successful companies in the world are doing.

Red Hat, the company which spearheads the development of the Linux operating system, generated revenues of half a billion dollars in the 2008 financial year, the vast proportion of which was profit, while IT company, Sun Microsystems, spent $1 billion in February 2008 to acquire database provider, MySQL.

The common thread is that both Linux and MySQL are open source systems. So what is open source?

The core concept is that software developed in this way can be freely redistributed by others. Open source also guarantees open access to the software’s source code, the lines of programming that make up the application, to enable others to develop and improve it.

This may sound as though the evolution of open source software is a free-for-all, but the truth is far from it. The development of open source technology is usually overseen by some form of governing organisation, which determines the general direction the development takes and which improvements are included in new versions.

This organisation can take the form of a broad community of developers and users, as is the case with the Apache web server, or a dominant single company taking input from other companies and individuals, such as MySQL.

Martin Michlmayr, a former project leader for Debian, an open source operating system, argues: “Open source is not a lawless frontier at all. There are clear license terms that have to be followed, even though open source generally offers more freedoms than proprietary software. It’s true, that many organisations are still struggling to understand open source and its license terms. That’s why Hewlett Packard, together with other partners, started a open source governance community, FOSSBazaar, to share best practices.”

While the open source concept may seem unusual in a business sense, it is far from new, with Red Hat arguing that scientists and mathematicians have shared their discoveries with each other for centuries with the goal of pushing forward the entire pool of knowledge.

It is this culture of openness and transparency that open source supporters say enables applications to be developed far more quickly and at a lower cost than proprietary alternatives. Also, as open source software is freely redistributed, this can lead to a rapid uptake among a user base. Take, for example, the speed at which open source web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google’s Chrome have been eating into Microsoft Internet Explorer’s domination of the sector.

However, it is not just individuals who are downloading and using open source software, businesses are embracing open source too. LinkedIn, the professional social networking website, started using MySQL to handle its database of more than 30 million people around the world last year. At the time, the company’s chief technology officer, Jean-Luc Vaillant, said that the “open and reliable environment” it provides saves the company both “time and money”.

According to John Newton, chief technology officer and co-founder of Alfresco, a provider of open source content management systems used by organisations as diverse as Islington Borough Council, the French Air Force and games maker Electronic Arts, the company’s software has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. “It is probably the most widely used content management system from an open source perspective. We built the product, people try it and they may pay for it but they may not,” he says.

The company makes its money through providing around 1,000 enterprises with technical support, training or consulting services to develop their own applications using Alfresco as a platform.

Read More….

An open source to a brighter future? – Times Online.