President-elect Barack Obama today began his pre-inauguration con­ver­sa­tion with the Amer­i­can peo­ple by giv­ing his first weekly radio address, which was also released as a YouTube video (above). In it he dis­cusses the cur­rent eco­nomic crisis.

Eric Shon­feld at TechCrunch: Obama to post fire­side chats on YouTube.

Brian Solis in today’s TechCrunch: Is Obama ready to be a two-way pres­i­dent? Excerpt:

The Obama team, for exam­ple befriended almost 130,000 friends on Twit­ter with an almost equal amount fol­low­ing him.

On Face­book, the Obama page boasted over three mil­lion fans com­pared to McCain’s 618,000.

YouTube also swayed towards Obama with a net­work of 358,000 to 191,000,
with the Obama camp post­ing over 1,800 videos com­pared to McCain’s 330.
These videos accounted for 110 mil­lion views. …

His first step towards bring­ing the vision of run­ning a cross-party cam­paign is the launch of Change.gov, a por­tal for trans­parency and inter­ac­tion dur­ing, and hope­fully past, the transition.

Other options Solis cites: solicit the public’s pol­icy pro­pos­als on Change For Us, cre­ate a chan­nel on Magnify.net, uStream.tv or BlogTalkRa­dio, cre­ate a cit­i­zen feed­back and col­lab­o­ra­tion page at Get­Sat­is­fac­tion.

Brett Hurt at Bazaar­blog: This elec­tion was won by social media.

The rise and fall and rise of liberalism

Mean­time, in this week’s Nov. 24 issue of Time mag­a­zine, I haven’t seen any­one else post the splen­did cover art of Obama as FDR — see below. In the cover story, Peter Beinart gives the most inci­sive look at The New Lib­eral Order — from FDR to LBJ to Obama — that I’ve read any­where. (I would have tweeted it instead of blogged it, but I want to be able to refer back to this piece years from now.)

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.