On Monday, Politico’s Byron Tau wrote an article describing the “brave new Web world,” confronting Obama -- a world in which email and blogs “have been declared passé.” The piece sparked heavy debate among party operatives, many of whom were critical of the notion that email and blogs were relics of antiquity.
– President Obama will host his first town hall as an official candidate for re-election—on Facebook. The president will go to company headquarters in Palo Alto on April 20 for the online forum, reports ABC. (Yes, Mark Zuckerberg will be there, too.) Participants can post questions for the president about the budget and the economy here, and Facebook will select questions during the event. It could foreshadow online strategy for the campaign, writes Sam Stein at the Huffington Post. He takes note of a recent Politico article making the case that social media platforms have largely replaced email and blogs as the way to reach out via the web. And Obama's "new media team clearly finds the Facebook forum a comfortable one to traverse," writes Stein.