Simon Johnson -- yeah, that Simon Johnson -- thinks Barack Obama should reconsider his opposition to blogs. Having the smartest people in a room is nice, but rooms have hierarchies, and a limited number of chairs, and social dynamics. Sometimes, they even have the insurmountable duo of Summers and Geithner. Blogs, says Johnson, allow for a rather broader range of expert opinion, and better, allow testimony from experts immune to the currents that govern the debate among ambitious appointees. But Obama almost certainly doesn't have sufficient time to pick through the blogosphere and find the voices worth following and the posts worth reading. Many of us bloggers know Jesse Lee, the White House's crack blog outreach guy. It would be nice, however, if the Eisenhower Executive Office Building housed Lee's inverse: An independent-minded new media guy charged by Obama with digging through the blogosphere and picking out a selection of posts and contrary voices that the President might find analytically useful. That's certainly happening on the communications side of things, where the blogs are watched with an eye towards message and influence. It would be nice to know a similar project was underway to trawl the more technical corners of the blogosphere for insights that might be useful but aren't being hunted down by a busy president or his overworked underlings, much less passed on by technocrats whose incentives don't include elevating analyses that undercut their own positions.
