One of my favorite stories of the week: Obama and ZuneGate

One of the funniest stories of the week was about what type of MP3 player President-elect Obama uses — Apple’s hyper-popular iPod or Microsoft’s much less popular Zune.

Here is how the WSJ.com’s BusinessTechnology blog reports it:

Obama ZuneGate, Day Two

Barack Obama: Zune man? Or Apple fanboy?

Yesterday the Philadelphia City Paper ignited a controversy over the question, with a blog entry that included the innocuous detail that the President-elect was working out while listening to the Microsoft (not Apple!) music player.

But today a spokesman puts the vicious rumor to rest. “Not true, the President-elect uses an iPod,” he says. And the Philadelphia writer, Neal Santos, blogs today: “It could belong to one of the many Secret Service dudes that were at the gym, Michelle, or even one of his daughters.”

That hasn’t stopped the merriment within the community — and yes, there is one — of Zune users, who are drastically outnumbered by iPod fans.

“For now we’re claiming the president-elect one of our own,” writes Adam Krebs on Zune Thoughts. On the site’s forums, Alber1690 writes “I was a staunch Hillary supporter, but this is awesome! I’m excited for the future of this country.”

“I don’t know if he can institute all of this change that everyone expects from him but he has impressed me once again,” writes Zune Max. “If the Zune team was on top of things they would send Obama some more Zunes for the new cabinet so they can Zunecast each other.”

Continue reading this item here.

Others had reported earlier that Obama was a Mac user. So… we’ll keep watch on Zune-gate.

Group pushes for an “open government”

In the past couple days, Lawrence Lessig has launched a new project: open-government.us, which aims to guide President-Elect Obama’s transition process to become an open and accessible process, open-government.us has set out three principles for start the transition in the right direction:

1. No Legal Barrier to Sharing (law (copyright law) should not block sharing);

2. No Technological Barrier to Sharing (code (limitations on downloads, for example) should not block sharing;

3. Free competition (no alliances should favor one commercial entity over another, or commercial over noncommercial entities).

They also have this video. See it here.

Read more at open-government.us.

FCW’s Fed 100 Awards: Recognizing the good work done by people… nominations open for the annual award program

It is the season for the Federal Computer Week’s Federal 100 awards program — now in its 20th year, it is one of the preeminent government awards programs recognizing people from the past year who have made a difference. [Nominate somebody online at fcw.com/fed100.

The Fed 100 awards were one of my favorite parts of being editor of Federal Computer Week. The program is remarkable. It also taps into my definition of Web 2.0 — all of us are smarter then each of us individually — because the nominations come from all of us. Each year, Federal Computer Week puts opens up the nominations and we/they get literally hundreds of them. Many of them are remarkable. Some of them — well, not so much.

On Friday, I had John Monroe, the acting editor of Federal Computer Week, on the Federal News Radio’s Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris to talk about the awards and how it work. You can hear that interview here.

The program is remarkable because, in the end, decisions aren’t made by the editors of Federal Computer Week. They are made by a team of judges — generally one of the most important things I did all year — selecting the right judging panel. This year, they have a pretty remarkable group.

As I said on the radio, I am going to make some nominations… many of the examples, you will have read here or heard on the radio. That being said, I think those people deserve recognition. Many of my nominations are for people who have done things that seems so easy, but, as we well know, often simple things can be very complex. Among my nominations:

• Robert Carey, the CIO of the Department of the Navy. Yes, Carey won a 2008 Fed 100 award, but that was more for his activities in 2007 in Iraq. In the past 12 months, he has just kept on innovating. In the past year, Carey became the first CIO to host a public blog. That blog now gets thousands of visitors each month. It is an innovative way of reaching out to his own team, his own service… and to the American public. But Carey didn’t only blog. He is also the first CIO to come up with a Web 2.0 policy — and it is a good one too. More of that in the post itself.
• Jeremy Ames is with EPA’s Indoor Environments Division, who came up with the fantastic Web 2.0 idea of having people create videos about radon for EPA. It was a fantastic idea — simple, yet so powerful.
• NAPA’s Frank DiGiamarino for the creation of NAPA’s Collaboration Project.
• NAPA’s Lena Trudeau for the National Dialogue on health IT and privacy.
• Washington, DC CTO Vivek Kundra for… well, just selecting a few things will be difficult, but… I think I’ll point to his efforts with Apps For Democracy.
• EPA’s Molly O’Neill and Mary McCaffery… again, there are so many things, selecting one will be difficult, but… EPA’s National Dialogue. (I’d love to give one to EPA’s Deputy Administrator Marcus Peacock, who has created a marvelous environment at EPA that allows all this wonderful innovation to take place.)

There are others. I’m in the search for the person on Team Obama who helped the campaign use technology so effectively. (This has spurred a whole debate on Twitter — some arguing that the Obama campaign did the same things that the McCain campaign did except they won. Another fed argued that Fed 100 should be reserved for “an actual fed… who has to work w/in existing rules & be successful. Wait til he’s in office.” My responses: First, there are 100 people, so there are plenty of nominations to go around for good work. But I always define Fed 100 as 100 people who go above and beyond to make a difference, and I think Team Obama so integrated technology into the way one runs for president — and I think that is bound to make a difference on how they government. It is such a building block that to ignore it would make the list look… out of place. But… comments welcome. In the end, the Fed 100 judges will decide what is deserving.

Some of my recommendations on writing up Fed 100 awards… after the break…