OK, not to be argumentative, but these sites are not really examples of web 2.0 in my humble opinion. And these "great interactive feature(s)" that "demonstrates the coming administration's commitment to bottom up participation" are really just obvious and simple attempts at marketers gathering more names and addresses. I am not sure this ".gov" site is even hosted on government servers, to be fair. Notice the fineprint when they explain that your contact information will be used in the whitehouse transition and, well, for whatever other purpose this new administration chooses to do with it. Honestly, other independent reviews of the site find much of the language surrounding getting people to submit contact information to be coercive (I think maybe that was the washington post that noted it and mentions the fact that they are "scrubbing" the site to tone down the lingo.) This reminds me of when the Obama campaign asked people to submit their cellphone numbers to get a text message about who his running mate would be. That was also a marketing ploy. Personally, I think it is time for the marketing to stop if we as Americans are going to trust that there aren't ulterior motives driving the coming efforts.

Allyson you are right about the interactivity versus one way communication but give it a few more days. You may check http://change.xeequa.com for a first glimpse ;-)

Steve - great feedback. My responses below.

1. After I published the article, some of the Change.gov's content was removed such as the agenda section. I believe this was taken down for legal reasons since there are legal issues around duplicating content from Obama's original 2008 campaign site.

2. My original headline when the article was first published read Change.Gov: Building the Internet Marketing Plan for the Next Administration but was shortened.

3. Web 2.0. is about engagement. Engagement is about marketing whether it be for the President Elect Obama transition team or @jetblue on Twitter responding to every tweet that flys across their screen commenting on Jet Blue's services. Simple engagement strategies such as Share Your Story features often require you to give up personal info such as name, email, etc. but it also provides an online space for ordinary citizens or customers to have a voice and share their opinions and experiences. In my opinion - that's a good thing. Every elected official and company should be engaging their constituents and customers and using people's contact info to continue the dialog.

4. Change.gov is legally part of the .gov family and is the official site of the President Elect Obama transition team.

Interesting post, Allyson. Part of the issue with declaring change.gov "web 2.0" is the lack of consensus on what exactly constitutes web 2.0 From a content strategy perspective you're totally right, it's about engagement (then again, I've been hanging around the 'net long enough to know that good content strategy has always been about engagement even when we were doing it via 1200 baud modem and it was green text on black) but from a development perspective it's about how you do that engagement. I'm just glad I got to see the site before they pulled all the substance. As for it not being visually engaging...meh...given that it was up and running less than 72 hrs after the election, I'll cut them a break.

Here is how Obama used Conversion Rate Optimization to maximize online donations:

In an amazing bit of sleuthing, Chris Goward blogs on how the Obama campaign successfully used a Conversion Rate Optimization strategy to maximize online donations.

Read all about it here: http://www.widerfunnel.com/case-study/obama-used-conversion-rate-optimiz... a and here is an update: http://www.widerfunnel.com/case-study/obamas-home-page-image-test#more-2...

Allyson, Thanks for a larger explanation. It makes more sense in the full scope of what you are saying. I'm a marketing / web design / developer and have been at this for about a decade now, so not too long. I definitely predate Web 2.0 and was a part of the "revolution" when it started in the mid to late 1990s (even if the phrase didn't get created by Tim O'Reilly for a few more years.)

I think that Web 2.0 was really a passionate description of new life getting breathed into the web via an more engaging, interactive and collaborative experience. If change.gov is an example of Web 2.0 then IBM.com circa 1990s is Web 2.0 simply because they had forms that gathered contact information to "continue the conversation." I think the article here is reaching. I grant barackObama.com and change.gov the honor it deserves as a well management marketing website, but attaching Web 2.0 to it and pretending it was really about an interactive on-going conversation is just more Obamania. Case and point: I think a genuine sign of Web 2.0 interaction and open collaborative communication is found in wiki-type examples, where the community helps shape the message using a mashup of tools that are fast, easy and spur more conversation growth in near real time. The Obama sites are pure marketing in the 1.0 style in that they have a deathgrip on their message (as well they should.) Pretending people have a voice by submitting a paragraph and your contact information into a void is 1.0-marketing. Now, if change.gov had the guts to post everyones vision and let people make comments, or edit a unified vision and trust the community with that, then... hey I would give them Web 2.0 props. This is all quite far from that I am afraid. I give the article an "A" for keeping watch over the evolution of these sites, because it is genuinely interesting. But I give the article a "D-" because it seems to miss it's own point (or worse yet get sucked into the marketing spin of the copy on the sites rather than provide any good review of the messages and mechanisms.)