Mark Zuckerberg got a big present from Santa this year: Facebook had more traffic on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day than Google. That’s a first, according to Hitwise, which tweeted the news.
MediaMemo’s Peter Kafka predicts Facebook could get a repeat on New Year’s Eve.
Click here for Kafka’s article.
The White House Correspondents Dinner gained some notoriety yesterday, when White House Budget Director Peter Orszag proposed to his girlfriend, ABC News correspondent Bianna Golodryga. The two met six months ago at the WHCD — Orszag was a guest at the ABC table.
The New York Times Caucus Blog reports that Orszag, who emailed 50 friends and family with the good news after popping the question over lunch at Sarabeth’s restaurant in New York City, said he was attracted to Golodryga because, “She’s a Russian Jew who gets up earlier than I do.”
As kids live more of their lives online–through social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and LiveJournal–schools are looking for ways to cope. Slate’s Nicholas Bramble suggests schools should try to harness students’ interest and creativity by integrating social media in the classroom, rather than stifle it.
“After all, it’s not as if most kids are investing commensurate energy into, say, their math homework. Why not try to start bridging the worlds of Facebook, YouTube, and the classroom?”
Bramble shares the warnings of John Dewey from a century ago:
“when teachers suppress children’s natural interests in the classroom, they ‘substitute the adult for the child, and so weaken intellectual curiosity and alertness, suppress initiative, and deaden interest.’ By locking social networking out of school, teachers and principals are making exactly that error.”
Click here for the rest of the article: “Fifth Period Is Facebook”
President Obama’s weekly address was a Christmas message, with First Lady Michelle Obama, and included a special tribute to the men and women in the military serving overseas. The White House web site suggested ways to support the troops through DOD’s Military Homefront, OurMilitary.mil, and the USO.
Watch the address here:
Now that the dust has settled and the 2009 election results have sunk in, the pondering and pontificating by the pundit elite (and not so elite) continues on cable news and online media sites about what the results mean for the president and the nation’s political future. Much of what is discussed is, and will continue to be, partisan in nature (as is the nature of cable news) and quite frankly, without much merit or solid research beyond party talking points and Wikipedia entries.
Discussions have been playing out on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News on whether Obama’s coattails are still strong; whether 2009 elections are a prediction of the 2010 midterms; whether the GOP can turn 2 key gubernatorial wins into a midterm Congressional movement, and so on. Most of these are unknowns, but there is one major continuous thread of the ’08 and now ’09 election cycle that is guaranteed to be part of every successful future campaign whether GOP or Dem or Conservative or Independent: the integrated use of social media and online communications (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, SMA, web 2.0, etc), combined with an authentic, engaging candidate, must be paramount within a campaign’s overall strategy in order to be successful.
Foggy windows, phone tubes, and a Surge Room are just a few of the surprises in the video tour conducted by Jeff Harley, President Obama’s deputy director of the Situation Room. Harley gives a walking tour of the rooms that make up the super secret area of the West Wing, where presidents monitor the world’s bad guys. Harley also lets us see a few of his colleagues at work, who are “1/3 intelligence community, 1/3 homeland security, and the rest military,” before getting in a slight jab at Wolf Blitzer. Blitzer’s situation room is about a mile away, and is not “The White House Situation Room,” Harley says in closing.
Here’s a WHC Insider look as to what the capital area looked in the snow storm of 2009.
Many woke up Saturday morning to over a foot of snow on the ground and the sky filled with flurries of snowflakes that didn’t stop coming down till the wee hours of Sunday morning. This became an instant snow day for many as buildings closed, and events were canceled everywhere from the Verizon Center to the Kennedy Center.
Inside, many huddled by fires and watched the news reports on TV, but many also went to their computers dubbing this storm a “Snowpocalypse” and on Twitter the trending hashtag became “#snOMG”. As the first flakes came down many posted pictures of the first few inches and eventually covered cars and complaints of having to shovel out driveways. Social media has made it possible for us to be snowed in together. Some people even took to the streets and braved the storm to check out what was going on.
Some just wanted to get pizza.
Families took to the hills and sledded on boards and inflatable tubes of all sizes. Some were even able to build a snow ramp! (See photo slide show above) Others took to the streets to dig out the 15 plus inches of snow from around their cars.
Fortunately, many won’t have to drive those cars into work as the the federal government has closed for Monday.
“This has been in the making for a very, very long time,” says Oprah Winfrey, of the upcoming “Christmas at the White House: An Oprah Primetime Special” airing this Sunday at 10pm ET on ABC.
No doubt, Ms. Winfrey has a hotline to the White House and apparently White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was often on the receiving end.
“I didn’t think I was going to get the first interview for the first 100 days – but I wanted an opportunity to sit down with them in a comfortable setting that all of America would be familiar and relate to. So I started asking when they first moved in to do a Christmas Special because I wanted to be at the White House during Christmas time and to experience their first Christmas in the White House.”
President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama greet Oprah Winfrey in the Blue Room of the White House, Dec. 3, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Winfrey tours the White House in all its grand holiday glory, with more than 27 trees and an almost 400 lb gingerbread “White House.” She sits down with her good friends President Barack and Michelle Obama in the Green Room – where, Winfrey points out, is where Thomas Jefferson used to eat his lunch – to discuss gift giving, stockings (even Bo has one) and yes, more decorations.
But behind the glittering tree lights and ribbons, comes a poignant recollection by the President on a cherished Christmas gift. “The one time I met my father he was visiting during Christmas and he gave me a basketball and – the degree to which I came to love basketball – it wasn’t until much later in life that I realized, ‘Actually, he gave me that basketball.’ I think there was some cause and effect there in terms of the degree to which I just ended up taking up the sport as a kid who didn’t know his dad.”
New memories will surely be made this Christmas as the Obamas celebrate their First
Christmas at the White House. But the real question remains: what are they giving Oprah?
Twitteratti Gather at Number 10 for Million Mums
One of the most compelling users of Twitter has been Sarah Brown, wife of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown; she’s been tweeting to raise awareness of the global campaign for maternal health as the Global Ambassador for The White Ribbon Alliance. The WRA for Safe Motherhood is uniting people in 142 countries to demand government action to end the unnecessary deaths of women during pregnancy and childbirth through the Million Mums Campaign.
Downing Tweet from whcinsider on Vimeo.
On Friday night Sarah Brown, who passed the million followers mark over the weekend, hosted a Tweetup (a gathering of Twitter friends) at Number 10 Downing Street. The invited guests originally had been surprised by a tweet from Brown, asking for a mailing address; some thought her account had been hacked or speculated a Christmas card was coming. But an invitation to a Number 10 Tweetup for the Million Mums Campaign caught everyone by surprise. Read more…
While Congress is debating the controversy over the gatecrashers at last week’s State Dinner, this week White House reporters are debating the new pool policy of the White House Correspondents Association.
Click HERE for Michael Calderone’s write up about online news organizations being added to the White House in-town press pool.
L to R: Bob Coonrod, Michelle Stanners, Doug Wilson, Judith McHale
Doug Wilson, EVP of the Howard Gilman Foundation and Chairman of the Board for the Public Diplomacy Collaborative at Harvard, has been nominated for assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. No h/t to INSRIA, since we got it from a highly placed source.
Once he’s confirmed by the Senate, Wilson will assist Secretary Robert Gates and Deputy Secretary William Lynn with DOD’s public information outreach, internal information distribution, community relations, AV issues, and will be in charge of DOD representation in cross-government communications efforts as well as the Pentagon’s official website.
In addition to his work at the Howard Gilman foundation, Wilson has previously served as President of The Leaders Project, as deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs (1997-1999) and principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. During his previous Pentagon appearance, Wilson coordinated communications efforts on defense reform, base closures, NATO expansion and military quality of life.
After starting his career as a Foreign Service information officer in a number of overseas assignments, Wilson worked at the U.S. Information Agency, and was a foreign policy advisor to U.S. Senator Gary Hart.
Business CEO’s are part of an Obama “corporate kitchen cabinet,” according to Politico’s Eamon Javers. The members lean heavily toward the tech and financial sectors: Eric Schmidt of Google, Jeff Immelt of GE, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, and Robert Wolf of UBS.
Wolf has even “scored an invitation to golf with Obama” — but there’s no free lunch for the corporate chieftains. “Each executive is asked for a credit card number and subsequently billed for [their] meal.”
CLICK here for the complete story.
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