From Open For Questions:

The President is holding a new kind of online town hall where he will answer the questions you submitted and voted on for him. The event begins here at 11:30am ET. You can read the most popular questions submitted on the economy below.

The operating word of the day is EXPERIMENT, an experiment in openess and reaching out to common folks. Allegedly. What it's obvious is that it's another opportunity for the Obama administration to practice one of the words from the OFQ Drinking Game: Persistence.

Yeah, this "Town Hall" was perfect for a late morning drinking game: Obama said the word LOANS at least a dozen time during his opening speech. Other words for the OFQ Drinking Game: The Budget and Patience.

This was indeed an interesting experiment but not in open communications. Even the most candid moment of the town hall, the "legalize marijuana" bit seemed to be carefully orchestrated.

Obama interrupted the flow of questions to address the fact that the most popular question was about why not legalize marijuana to help the economy. It's as if he had read Micah Sifry's tweet about Nancy Scola's ""Mary Jane Rule". It was absolutely made to make him hip and cool --and by grock, it so worked. By the by, may I point out he said it didn't make sense to legalize it as part of the economic rescue plan? just to be clear that he declared the reason for legalizing marijuana wrong but not necessarily the actual idea of legalizing marijuana.

Heh.

Anyhow, the point being that this "Open For Questions" experiment is not necessarily what it seems to be. It is not necessarily a way to allow We The People into the process of government.

The way the Obama administration are using these web 2.0 tools is in a very cleverly orchestrated way to by-pass the right-wing clusterfock of big media while campaigning hard for their agenda. It is not necessarily a two-way street that allows constituents to demand more clarity or even challenge the White House's talking points.

On that note, let me end this with my thoughts on the livestream from the point of view of the user experience:

Even though cable news networks were broadcasting live the OFQ Town Hall, I wanted to watch it streamed online. My streaming experience was horrible.

I am on RCN cable broadband, allegedly their fastest plan. I have an Apple Powerbook G4 with 1.5 RAM. And yet, the audio skips a lot. The video is even worse: As I said in a tweet using Christian Bale's immortal words, the video lag was "f*cking distracting".

Some of my Twitter readers didn't have a problem at all with their livestream, so that leaves me some questions:

• was my computer too slow?
• was my broadband access too slow?
• if I have 3G broadband, is RCN throttling my connection without my knowledge?

The Obama administration says it is experimenting with ways to open up direct channels of communication with We The People in an attempt to forge the way to better transparency in government. Well, we need to make sure they force the telecomms to fall in line with those same principles of transparency, equality and open access to internet technology.

That's why Susan Crawford's appointment is so important.

Net Neutrality FTMFW!