Thomas, a German friend of mine, emailed me today. He could not believe some of the stuff that he saw at the White House website and asked me if this was really official. The answer was no, he was being confused by US free speech.

www.whitehouse.gov is the official website for the White House. However, other people purchased the various whitehouse internet extensions. For example, whitehouse.com is a porn site. As distasteful as that is, at least it is obviously not the real whitehouse site. However, whitehouse.org is a spoof site done by crude leftists (think of a lame version of the Onion, done by liberals who think vomit protests are a constructive exercise of civil rights). From a foreign perspective, whitehouse.org could easily be confused for an official site.

This left me with mixed feelings. I was thrilled that Thomas asked me instead of simply assuming that the Bush White House had gone off the deep end. However, I fear that many Europeans may come across this site, confuse it for an official site, and not bother to ask anyone. Since a lot of my readers are European, I thought I would share this experience.

One piece of trivia for you - since the US invented the internet, the US government reserved the extension .gov for official US government sites (Federal and State sites). So if a site ends in .gov, it is official. If it does not end in .gov, it is probably not an official site of the US government. (Caveat: Local governments such as cities still use traditional extensions, not the .gov extension).