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Barack Obama needs no introduction. Even my 4 year old knows his name and what he looks like (and we, I remind you, are living in Israel, some thousands of kilometers away from Washington). It seems that Obama is everywhere, and his always-on presence is quite remarkable even for an American president.

Last month in an incredible New York Magazine article titled “The Message Is The Message” Jennifer Senior gave some numbers to go with my impressions:

Since occupying the White House, Barack Obama has hosted fifteen town-hall meetings; appeared in more than 800 images on the White House Flickr photo-stream; and held four prime-time press conferences, the same number held by George W. Bush in his entire presidency. He’s sent a video message to the people of Iran. He’s given an address in Cairo that was translated into fourteen languages. He’s sat on Jay Leno’s couch, where he riffed about the supreme strangeness of having his own motorcade (“You know, we’ve got the ambulance and then the caboose and then the dogsled”), and he’s walked Brian Williams through the White House, where he introduced the anchor to Bo the dog…

Such are the president’s media habits. It’s gotten to the point where one expects to see and hear from him every day. He’s in the information business almost as much as the policy business.

Now this wouldn’t sound far-fetched, if I was talking about an Internet persona such as Michael Arrington or Guy Kawasaki, wouldn’t it? It seems that Barack Obama, or someone on his team, really bothered to study and understand the power of social media and presence, and liked what he found out. To quote Gal Mor, who wrote about “the Obamaism” (sadly, in Hebrew):

Obama is an independent news agency designed solely to maintain the Obama brand. The elected US president is a one-man Twitter service, founder of a news feed that signals the direction in which we’re all moving in.

Always On, Or You’re Gone!

Following the Obama data stream is a tricky business. On one hand, it’s great to be able to keep such a close watch on such a great man (without alarming the Secret Service). On the other hand, with the amount of content that the Obama brand is creating, finding your way and sorting things out is quite a complicated task.

And Obama is, in a lot of ways, an early adopter. It doesn’t take a political genius (or a social media expert) to know that in a couple of years (months, if you ask the Facebook/Twitter/<Fill The Empty Space> people) everybody would be, or want to be, Barack Obama. Not serving as the leader of the free world, but documenting their lives and broadcasting it live to everyone and anyone who is interested.

This is not fiction. Even today people are using e-mail, instant messaging, micro-blogging services (like Twitter), social networks (like Facebook) and other means of peer-to-peer communication to update their presence to friends and family. And if IM was truly peer-to-peer, with e-mail you can send your pictures to your favorite mailing list, with Facebook you can upload the photos for all your friends to see, and with Twitter they can get to thousands of people (depending on the number of followers you have and how interesting they are).

If in the past you had to call your not-so-close friends to know they still exist (and let them know you do too), today’s communication tools are updating you with their presence information constantly. Try not to log on to the instant messaging service at work for a few days or refrain from tweeting for a week – people WILL be worried. It seems that offline is not a valid status these days. And it’s only going to get worse.

With WiFi everywhere, with devices that will keep us “always connected”, with life logging services documenting our daily routine, with automatic status updates – it seems that our digital presence will slowly grow to resemble our real (physical) presence, in volume and depth.

Data Flow or Over Flow?

And that is not necessarily a bad thing. The main problem with the increase in volume and depth is, as usual, real-estate. And I’m not talking about the real-estate crisis Obama is trying to solve, but the real-estate available in our clients (and our brains) to deal with such a never-ending flood of information. We haven’t really reached a point where textual data mining is effective, and already we have to mine images, videos, multimedia files, from different sources and in different qualities.

If following “just” Obama is an almost impossible mission, think about following all of your friends, when every one of them is a little Obama. And add to that your co-workers, your colleagues, the interesting people you follow… It’s easy to see how this can quickly turn into an ugly mess, that will make all of us drop everything altogether and return to the basics. Which, in a sense, is already happening, in a small scale, with people exposed to Facebook or Twitter for the first time, without really understanding the medium and the way to deal with it.

Just as Google, with its revolutionary (back then, and still today) search engine turned the World Wide Web into a global village and the biggest source of information on the planet, as it effectively (up to a certain extent) matched queries with data (assuming, of course, you know how to use it), the “status-phere” could become an incredible wealth of data, if we can only find the ways to sort it out.

Match text, image and video; choose between an array of videos taken at the same event; find data that is relevant to my geographical location; automatically filter important and relevant information (based, of course, on my own personal preferences) – all this, and more, are ideas that are already researched, implemented (to some extent) and will be the basis for the success of this user generated, data overflow revolution, and the key for its mass adoption.

Powerful, wonderful data flow or painful, dreadful data over flow? There’s a thin line that passes between them. And only time will tell where we will find ourselves by the time Barack Obama is no longer the elect US president (hopefully some 7 years from now).