Democracy Online: The White House's Netcasts and town Meetings

The rise of the Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) might be breaking down barriers between the President and the public. Since Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign in 1992, his staff has used the Internet as a communications conduit. With the help of research scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT's) Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the White House's Comlink system has been offering increasingly intelligent publication and collaboration services via the Internet and the World Wide Web. This technology could well augur a new age of online politics. The development of the system is reviewed and it is argued that the Comlink approach holds great promise in the content-rich world of the WWW.