By GAUTHAM NAGESH
With an unprecedented interest in the presidential transition among the media and public, the Obama administration is going to have to be careful about what they put out on the Internet. The blogosphere has been buzzing about the disappearance of the detailed policy agenda from Barack Obama's transition Web site, change.gov. From CNET:
The "agenda" Web pages on change.gov seem to have mysteriously disappeared on Sunday. By Monday morning, they were replaced with a vague statement saying that Obama and running mate Joe Biden have a "comprehensive and detailed agenda" that will "bring about the kind of change America needs," with the individual pages deleted entirely.
Obama's camp is claiming the changes are a consequence of the web site's hasty launch last week:
"We're retooling the Web site," said spokesman Nick Shapiro to Pro Publica. "Basically, it was put up within hours after we won. We took everything down to rework it."
Regardless of whether the information is re-posted or altered, the incident is a lesson to the new administration: with so much attention focused on every move and statement being made, it's important that nothing is posted on the Internet before it's vetted and approved first. We'll call that the Palin Rule.
The fact that so many sites have posted cached versions of the deleted Web pages just drives the point home further; in this day and age, nothing you post on the Internet is going to go away quickly just because you pull it off your server.
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