President Bush Indicted for Podcasting?

President Bush Indicted for Podcasting?

Two pieces of blog related news today centered around the President of the United States have nothing to do with his stance on speaking with Iraq War protesters, making millions by injecting Jose Canseco and the Texas Rangers with steroids, or whether or not Bush plans to “pull out.” No, instead the news is considerably less political.

You see, George W. Bush is now doing on of the hippest things on the planet besides blogging or choking on pretzels – the President is podcasting! My golly? Who said the ultra-rich Kennebunkport Bush family is out of touch with society? The White House’s Podcast can be found on the President’s Radio Address page at the “Subscribe to Radio Address Podcast” link. Another cool link on this page is to FirstGov’s US Government RSS Library which is full of news RSS feeds from most divisions of the Federal Government.

Not only is the President Podcasting, but he’s also listed on Technorati’s top searches for “Bush Indictment.” Bush Indictment? What’s that? Well about 5 am EST this morning the link was on Technorati’s “Top Searches This Hour” – leading some to believe that there are bloggers out there with the leaked news. Steve Rubel posts : Many are saying it’s a Technorati bombing hoax, but there’s a rumor going ’round the blogosphere that President Bush is going to be indicted in the Valerie Plume case. Here’s what’s known for sure, right now “bush indictment” is the number one search on Technorati.

Jeremiah posts his view of the host on Organic Warfare : A hoax claiming that Bush and a number of his administration officials had been indicted became #1 search term on the blog indexing service Technorati. This is an example of political netwar. There is no new news, but activists are able to keep the Plame affair and other corruption scandals in the public eye by performing culture jamming activities which exploit inherent vulnerabilities in search engines. Similar events have taken place on Google between warring Republican and Democrat factions.