"Transparency" by Image & Text - Politicians start to play.

In a move to use yet another social medium next to YouTube & Twitter, the White House has opened up a Flickr stream.

President Barack Obama is briefed about the H1N1 flu in the Situation Room 4/24/09.Official White House Photo by Pete Souzas

The pictures, posted at regular intervals, show us the "daily life" of President Obama and at the look of the comments the photos are receiving people really like it.

Some pictures are serious and really reflect what probably are though meetings and difficult decisions, others are on their way to become classics and yet others show a President trying to relax the best he can.

Another interesting development in social media and politics is the use of Twitter...

In an article on Mashable, entitled "How Should President Obama Use Twitter ?", Ari Herzog (@ariherzog) gives a very good overview of how politicians use this medium.

He mentions several US politicians using Twitter as well as the official twitter channel for the British Prime Minister's Office based at 10 Downing Street.

From my end here in Brussels I had a really nice lunch recently with the founder of Europatweets, a referencing site for all European Members of Parliament who use Twitter.

Xavier Damman is really doing a nice job here but the awareness creation towards other MEPs is still very much needed.

The question is; are all these initiatives giving us a false sense of transparency or are they really going to change the way we perceive and communicate with the people we voted for...?

I do hope that here in Belgium we can do more than the "year with Verhofstadt", which is, by all means was a very good PR stunt...

Comments

[Ari Herzog]

Thanks for the shout-out to me and Mashable, Horatio. I can't predict the future anymore than you, and hadn't heard of the White House on Flickr until you mentioned it. It's noteworthy the feed receives an equivalent number of views and comments as the U.S. Library of Congress (and comparable global archive museums via The Commons) on Flickr.

Only "we" can say whether these initiatives will change anything. I give it 12 months.