[Yr7-10it] Re: How Obama Will Use Web Technology

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

> > .. We're eager to see the use of these technologies extended to
> > http://www.WhiteHouse.gov initially and from there we'd love to
> > see more government agencies quickly embrace web technologies to
> > promote communication, transparency and participation.
> 
> They are going to have their work cut out for them structuring the 
> information so it is discoverable ... Best regards, Jan Whitaker
> website designer and Expat American who is once again proud to say so!

Good on you for your work Jan .. and it does appear that Obama is indeed
working quickly and certainly honorably to achieve open-source-government

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

"Here's a small and nerdy measure of the huge change in the executive
branch of the US government .. Here's the (Bush) robots.txt file from
the www.whitehouse.gov website this week:

 User-agent: *
 Disallow: /cgi-bin
 Disallow: /search
 Disallow: /query.html
 Disallow: /omb/search
 Disallow: /omb/query.html
 Disallow: /expectmore/search
 Disallow: /expectmore/query.html
 Disallow: /results/search
 Disallow: /results/query.html
 Disallow: /earmarks/search
 Disallow: /earmarks/query.html
 Disallow: /help
 Disallow: /360pics/text
 Disallow: /911/911day/text
 Disallow: /911/heroes/text

And it goes on like that for almost 2400 lines! 

Here's the new Obamafied robots.txt file:

 User-agent: *
 Disallow: /includes/

That's it! BTW, the robots.txt file tells search engines what to include 
and not include in their indexes. (eg Google) by Jason Kottke  •  Jan 20,
2009 at 02:29 pm   http://www.kottke.org/tag/barackobama
--

Cheers, Jan
Stephen Loosley
Victoria, Australia