By now we all know that President Obama is a huge fan of social media. Our most “plugged in” president yet, Obama has been an outspoken proponent of everything from the BlackBerry to Facebook. Sounds like you can now add Twitter to that list as well, or so claims the Portland Water Bureau.
The story here though isn’t necessarily that the president or one of his aides is actually following the feed, no, the story is in the reactions of several Oregonlive.com readers – just check out some of the comments on the link above. You’ve got everything from the jealous web designer spoutin’ off about “real websites coded in PHP and ASP with the XML and HTTP” to geriatric old KXL Brian Bushlach and Lars Larson listeners that just don’t get “that facetwitcher that these kids are into today”. Jesus. Throw in a bunch of crap about the water bureau itself wasting time, energy and money and it becomes painfully clear that Portland is a progressive place, sure, but we’ve still got a long way to go before a large segment of the population catches up to modern times. Sad.
For my part, I think it’s pretty damn cool. I had no idea that the water bureau had a blog, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed, and a Flickr account – and who would have guessed that they both keep up on it and provide some rather interesting stuff on each one? Props to whoever had the balls to give this a try, it has the potential of being a great way for people to keep in touch with them. I’d love to see TriMet and even PGE do the same thing. Why the hell not?
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The older generation nearly always has difficulty accepting the challenges of accepting that which is new and different. While I agree with your sentiment, I don’t find it as surprising as you do.
I don’t think people that old even use the internet anyway do they?!! I follow obama on twitter but I don’t think it’s really him.
No, they don’t. Congress just passed a law last August prohibiting anyone over the age of 30 from using the Internet. Congress figured that this was better than the alternative, a system called “Carousel” in which anyone reaching their 30th birthday would have to don an anti-gravity uniform, float upward toward the sky, and subsequently explode – all while young people watched. Republicans shot that one down thankfully.
Just a comment that even though we LOVE the Portland Water Bureau, the Red Cross blog totally kicked their booties in Blog-Off ’08.
If you really want to see inspired use of social media, you’re probably going to want to check this out. Read from the bottom up — and follow us on Twitter, too!
http://redcrosspdx.blogspot.com/search/label/Blog-Off
Lise,
Some shameless self promotion there don’t you think? Good for you. I just got done spending a full twenty minutes reading the Red Cross blog, very cool. I’ve added you to the Links That Don’t Suck at right. Thanks for passing that along, I’m hooked.
RobertWagner
There are some awesome blood pictures on your blog Lise