China’s bloggers are a focus of organizers of the President Barack Obama’s upcoming visit, echoing similar efforts by the administration to use social-media tools to communicate with Americans.

On Thursday, U.S. State Department officials held simultaneous press briefings for a select group of predominantly Chinese bloggers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, giving a rundown of the U.S. president’s China schedule and took questions from the bloggers.

The attendee list included many influential bloggers, such as journalist Michael Anti, who blogs about freedom of the press, and Rao Jin, whose Anti-CNN Web site scrutinizes China coverage by the news network and other foreign media.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Efforts to reform the U.S. health-care and bank lending systems are likely to lead to an increase in information-technology spending, said one potential beneficiary, Sudhakar Ram, chairman of IT firm Mastek.

Overhauling the country’s IT systems could cost as much as $250 billion to $300 billion over five to seven years, he said in an interview. In addition, he estimated that electronic health records will cost some $150 billion to $200 billion under the Obama administration’s health-care initiatives ($20 billion of stimulus funds have already gone toward the project).

Stronger systems might have mitigated last year’s economic turmoil, Mr. Ram said. “The subprime crisis started with poor controls at the loan origination process, which a halfway decent loan-origination system should have trapped,” he said. “The core systems are several decades old and written in outdated programming languages.”

That’s like blaming superhighways for traffic jams, said Andrew Bartels, an analyst at Forrester Research (FORR) who studies tech-spending trends.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest effort to call out what it considers violations of copyright and trademark law comes in the form of a mock-awards page, complete with “honorees,” called the Takedown Hall of Shame.

The tech-advocacy group highlights a handful of cases it calls “the most egregious examples of takedown abuse,” usually involving businesses or organizations that cry foul–or issue takedown notices–even when their copyrighted materials are used in accordance with fair-use laws.

Among the honorees are National Public Radio, which tried to get an All Things Considered segment removed from YouTube because it appeared in an anti-same-sex-marriage ad. Others include NBC, for yanking an Obama campaign video that used archival footage of Tom Brokaw, and the National Organization for Marriage, which pulled YouTube footage of Rachel Maddow criticizing the audition tapes of one of its ads opposing gay marriage.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Today President Obama announced what the White House is calling “the largest single energy-grid modernization investment in U.S. history.” It’s actually anything but “single”–it’s $3.4 billion in stimulus funds to help pay for a collection of projects scattered around different utilities and companies.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

In yet another repudiation of its predecessor, the Obama administration this week migrated the White House Web site to Drupal, the popular open-source Web site management software. By dumping the Bush administration’s proprietary system and embracing software authored by the community and available to everyone, the consensus holds, the White House embodies the very essence of the new politics.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

And then there were five–defections from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its climate–change policy, that is.

Apple (AAPL) today resigned its membership in the Chamber “effective immediately.” That’s a harsher tone than the other departures–three utilities said they’d let their membership lapse at the end of the year, and Nike (NIKE) simply quit the Chamber’s board of directors.

At issue, again, is the Chamber of Commerce’s opposition to the Obama administration’s climate policy, most notably the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions.

Apple has recently been on a green crusade to catch up to tech rivals Dell (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) which have a shinier environmental reputation. And of course, Al Gore is on the Apple board.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

On Tuesday, Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, unveiled Apps.Gov, a Web site where federal agencies will able to buy so-called cloud computing applications and services that have been approved by the government to replace more costly and cumbersome computing services at their own locations.

The push to promote cloud computing is part of the Obama administration’s effort to modernize the government’s information technology systems and to help reduce the $75 billion annual budget for federal I.T. in the process.

Read the rest of this post at the original site

Obama officials received some 2,200 applications from companies and organizations for some of the $7.2 billion in stimulus money set aside by Congress to build out new high-speed Internet lines and services.

Applicants asked for upwards of $28 billion in funding for projects, far more than Obama officials have to distribute. The Commerce Department and Agriculture Department are handing out up to $4 billion of its total stimulus funding for the first round of applications, which were due last week. Two more funding rounds are planned later this year and early next year.

“Applicants requested nearly seven times the amount of funding available, which demonstrates the substantial interest in expanding broadband across the Nation,” said Lawrence E. Strickling, the Commerce Department’s assistant secretary for communications and information.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The Obama administration is proposing to scale back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with “cookies” and other technologies, raising alarms among privacy groups.

A two-week public comment period ended Monday on a proposal by the White House Office of Management and Budget to end a ban on federal Internet sites using such technologies and replace it with other privacy safeguards. The current prohibition, in place since 2000, can be waived if an agency head cites a “compelling need.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The Obama administration’s most radical idea may also be its geekiest: Make nearly every hidden government spreadsheet and buried statistic available online, all in one place. For anyone to see.

Read the rest of this post

A group of 10 tech-industry executives spent Tuesday and Wednesday lobbying members of Congress and the Obama administration on issues like taxes, immigration reform, and software piracy.

The group, which included Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, Adobe (ADBE) CEO Shantanu Narayen, and Sybase (SY) CEO John Chen, met with Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, and Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, among others. Their visit comes as the tech sector is generally enthused about some elements of the administration’s stimulus package, but beginning to express worries about potential tax hikes being suggested to pay for the expanded government spending.

The executives highlighted the contribution of the tech sector to the U.S. economy—the country exported $36 billion worth of software more than it imported in 2008—and advocated for policy changes that would help the sector, says Robert Holleyman, president of the Business Software Alliance, the trade organization that arranged the meetings.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Andrew McLaughlin’s departure from Google (GOOG) to the Obama administration has prompted a little grumbling among some consumer advocates and the search giant’s corporate foes.

Mr. McLaughlin, who was Google’s head of global public policy and government affairs, is leaving Silicon Valley for Washington, D.C., to become a deputy to Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, who’s in charge of advancing the president’s tech agenda.

The White House has declined to confirm Mr. McLaughlin’s appointment. Google has confirmed he’s left the company but remained mum about where he’s going.

On Wednesday, two consumer advocacy groups sent a letter to the White House asking administration officials to reconsider hiring Mr. McLaughlin, since he previously oversaw Google’s lobbying efforts.

Read the rest of this post

Cisco (CSCO) on Monday announced an initiative to sell high-tech gear to utilities, a market the company says could be a $20 billion-a-year market by 2014.

Political junkies may have heard the term “smart grid,” which is one of the areas that the Obama administration has targeted with its stimulus package. The government is committing billions to facilitate building a next-generation electrical grid that’s more energy efficient.

Cisco looks at all this talk about green and sees, well, green. In order to improve their networks, utilities will need to buy routers and switches and other gear that Cisco just happens to sell. Cisco introduced energy-management software in January, and it will no doubt come out with other products that it will package together for utility companies.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

A mood of tension has gripped the White House in recent days as President Obama prepares himself for a new round of criticism from one of the nation’s most powerful and influential constituencies: pajama-wearing Internet users who post anonymous comments on liberal blogs.

In the West Wing, Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel has set up a high-tech “war room” to monitor the blog comments from the President’s basement-dwelling critics, postings which one White House source said could be “really mean” in the days ahead.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The White House is making unprecedented use of consumer web technologies but those technologies aren’t always well suited to fit the government’s needs. They aren’t always well suited to fit anyone’s needs–but maybe if Obama leans on them a little bit things will change.

Read the rest of the post on the original site