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After tech publisher Tim O'Reilly blogged about Obama's selection of Virginia's Secretary of Technology for the cabinet post of Chief Technology Officer yesterday ("Why Aneesh Chopra is a Great Choice for Federal CTO)," he Tweeted to his posse, ""Hey, folks with all the RTs* about #AneeshChopra, how about making some positive comments on the blog post to counter the slashdot trolls?"

*RT is a retweet, the equivalent of forwarding an email.

The post he refers to at programmer megasite Slashdot (Obama Appoints Non-Tech Guy As CTO) -- a post based on the view of Venture Beat, a magazine about venture capital in Silicon Valley -- sounds as appalled as if Obama had appointed alt-medicine guru Deepak Chopra.

...Before he got his secretary job in 2005, he was a managing director at the Advisory Board Company, a public-market health care think tank, as well as an angel investor.

But a comment (Good Choice) on that post begins with some original reporting,

I worked with Aneesh earlier this year on an open government project here in Virginia. ...He might not know Unicode from Latin 1, but he surrounds himself with people who do know the difference, he gets the gist of it from them, and chooses the path that provides the most accessibility for the most data to the most people...

The WSJ seems to have missed all this. The Digits Blog headline is Tech Industry Cheers as Obama Taps Aneesh Chopra for CTO:

Silicon Valley execs and tech bloggers sounded genuinely excited about Obama's choice Saturday morning and tech industry lobbying groups TechNet and the Business Software Alliance quickly released statements of support, as did several tech heavyweights.

I grow increasingly cynical about the mobilization and influencing of opinion. Let's see what Aneesh Chopra is charged with, and how well he executes it. Personally, I think the appointment makes sense -- the administration ranks reforming health care as a major priority, reforming the Net is not one.

Simpler: Whole Earth Catalog author Stewart Brand lives on a tugboat. He's the subject of the latest Domains interview in the N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine, which involves short answers to implied questions.

Controversial stand: That technology can be green. The book I just finished, "Whole Earth Discipline," has chapters on why nuclear is green, cities are green, genetic engineering is green. The romantic nature-is-perfect approach is just horse exhaust.

 Tags  Obama

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