Whitehouse

Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States and with that came a number of changes to the Whitehouse website. Two changes that were mentioned across the web today are:

1. Robots.txt – Jason Kottke compared the robots.txt file from the old Whitehouse website and the new Whitehouse site that launched earlier today. The robots.txt file tells search engines what pages of your site to include or not include. Apparently, the new robots.txt file consists of 2 lines:User-agent: *
   Disallow: /includes/

   The old robots.txt file consisted of 2400 lines excluding multiple sections of the site.
    

2. Creative Commons – Joi Ito points out that the new Whitehouse website copyright notice includes Creative Commons. As listed on the site: 

   Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.

   Except where otherwise noted, third-party content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Visitors to this website agree to grant a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to the rest of the world for their submissions to Whitehouse.gov under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.