"AIDS.gov Failed"

Miguel Gomez took a very different approach from other speakers at the Gov 2.0 Expo by opening his presentation about AIDS.gov by asserting that AIDS.gov was a failure. Of course, this attention-getting gambit wasn't a real admission of failure, since Gomez described a highly successful campaign that his program had initiated in which those who text 566948 from cell phones could quickly find an HIV testing center. But he did explain how people scared about HIV "don't care about Twitter" and how 80% of users simply wanted information about the disease.

I've described several times on this blog how I would advise the government against creating still more domain names not tied to specific federal agencies that would have the responsibility to maintain them, but apparently the Obama administration is also planning to launch "tobacco.gov," "obesity.gov," and several other similar sin sites. But I have to give Gomez credit for a good argument about "repurposing content" and how the text from a blog posting could be reused as a podcast script and picked over for factoids to be tweeted at Twitter. He also described how excessive monitoring of user-generated content on the HIV.gov page on Facebook proved to be unnecessary and how "the community took care of it already" when a single abusive comment appeared.

Despite the program's revamping, I still think there are oddities in how AIDS.gov seems to conceive of its audience. A prominent section on "Using New Media" seems particular inappropriate for its client population and its frontline community service providers.