A reader takes rightful issue with the idea that, first stated by the LA Times and passed along by yours truly in yesterday's cache, that somehow President Obama managed to post four times to Twitter, in the first-person, while similtaneously delivering his speech of Iraq, with not a computing device in sight.

That's not right, it seems. The @BarackObama account, handled by Organizing for America, shows four tweets starting at 8:20pm -- that is, after Obama had wrapped up his brief Oval Office address on Iraq, which had started at eight. Duly noted. Maybe the east coast-west coast time zone discrepency was the problem.

But frankly, in retrospect, the whole thing seems a little silly. Should we be reassured by the notion that the President of the United States could have whipped out his BlackBerry after announcing the end of combat operations and tweeted? Politicians have staff so that they can outsource the particulars of their day-to-day work, driven -- they hope -- by the spirit of their vision and priorities. Why is it considered perfectly kosher for Jon Favreau or another White House speech writer to help craft lines like "I know this historic moment comes at a time of great uncertainty..." and the rest of what came out of the President's mouth during his Oval Office address, and then suddenly decide that having a professional at Organizing for America do the same for his tweets is horribly inauthentic?

Anyway, correction issued.

• A new Vanity Fair profile brings up the question of whether Sarah Palin's outsourced her Facebook and Twitter postings to a ghostwriter, but the consultant in question says that "anything that goes out under [Palin's] name is hers" -- making "Obama speech tonite may make u dig out ur old Orwell books" pure Palin.
• The same can't be said for Barack Obama, who tweeted in the first person while also somehow delivering his Oval Office address on Iraq last night.
• You know who's a good friend to transparency? Scribd, says Sunlight.
• Paticipatory democracy victories come in many flavors. Pat Quinn, mayor of Galesburg, IL, declares one in that people will now be able to put campaign yard signs up earlier and take them down later.
• A new push to let military members from the great state of New Jersey cast their ballots online.
• Nigeria's Minister of the Interior says that the Nigeria you see online isn't the real one.
• Native tribes in the U.S. are nervous about a shift in broadband funding they were hoping to see come their way.
• And speaking of broadband, the Federal Communication's hefty National Broadband Plan is soon to be translated into Tagalog, amongst other languages.

A QR code at a park in Manor, Tx., is a visual hyperlink to more information about the field. City of Manor // Flickr photo

As technologists around the country — some of whom you may have heard of — are calling for an age of innovation, experimentation, and rebirth in the American city, those same localities are shutting off streetlights (as in my home town of Santa Rosa, Ca.), downsizing police forces, closing public transit lines, and reducing other services.

Open government advocates see technology and innovation — used correctly — as part of the solution. And as part of two-day conference in a city regarded as an example of innovation in practice, they'll try to prove that tech solutions to civic problems can be replicated on any scale.

On Sept. 20 and 21, Manor, Tx. will host manor.govfresh, a two-day conference for state and local public servants to talk tech and open government. And they'll be giving another Texas town — De Leon, population 2,433 — a "Gov City 2.0 Makeover."

• Russia | Online cooperation in the Russian blogosphere: an alternative for government?
  Can cyber activism provide an alternative for government? That's what Gregory Asmolov analyzes in his review of how the Russian blogosphere acted during the recent wildfires:

Google's new "Priority Inbox" for Gmail is the company's attempt to help the 175 million or so people who use Gmail to manage their messages by bubbling up the important ones while downplaying the rest. Powering the thing will be a filter created by Google, but one that can be molded through user feedback. So what does it mean for the many people in the political world who rely upon email to campaign, fundraise, and orgnize online? Creative director Elliot Ross has some early guidance:

The key to getting into the priority inbox is relevance. The user is now actively teaching filters what they want to read, so every mailing should be as useful and engaging as possible. This means segregating your lists, following design and HTML best practice and cutting out irrelevant ‘blanket blasts’ to everyone. It might even mean mailing people less sometimes.

From the folks behind the crowd-sourcing reporting system Ushahidi comes an announcement that a brand-new version of SwiftRiver has launched. SwiftWha? Here's the scoop:

SwiftRiver is an open source intelligence gathering platform for managing realtime streams of data... SwiftRiver is unique in that there is no singular ‘SwiftRiver’ application. Rather, there are many, that combine plugins, APIs and themes in different ways that are optimized for different workflows. If you’re a journalist researching different subjects you’ll probably use a different Swift App than say a crisis response organization.

In other words, we're talking about a suite of open-source tools that helps folks manage streams of data, from Twitter tweets to incoming emails to RSS feeds. But more that that, what's at issue is solving a problem that pops up in the sort of crowd-source event responses we've seen during everything from the 2008 election, in the form of the Twitter Vote Report project, to the response around the world to the earthquake in Haiti. How do you empower large numbers of people to sort through information and assess its authority in a way that is both distributed and trustworthy?

For one thing, you design it to be welcoming. As part of the beta launch of the new SwiftRiver, there's a Sweeper app, inspired, in fact, by the work done to use volunteers to geolocate and verify reports that came in from Haiti, and described this way: "This application is designed for speed and ease of use with big easy to read text, bright buttons and a very clean layout." You can check out the new SwiftRiver here.

Radio, check. Television, check. Rallies down on the National Mall, check. Now Glenn Beck wants to conquer the Internet.

Meet The Blaze. No, not the school newspaper on "90210," original show and remake. The Blaze, says Beck, is inspired in name by the work of 18th century evangelical preacher George Whitefield and in spirit by Beck's awakening to the deficiencies of modern American journalism. "Nobody will pursue the stories that we think should be pursued," said Beck on his radio program. "I've only got an hour of television and three hours of radio," he went on. "I know that sounds like a lot, but when you're trying to do the job that all of the newspapers and all of the television stations are doing, it's pretty difficult."

Describing itself as "a news, information and opinion site brought to you by Glenn Beck and a dedicated team of writers, journalists & video producers," The Blaze's model is one of blending what you made call traditional investigative journalism fueled by the sort of social-media driven editorial decisions we've been talking about this week.

"It would be really, a site where a lot of the stuff would be generated by you," said Beck to his listeners, describing how he sold his boss on the idea. "I've been saying for a while that the reason why we're ahead of the curve is because we listen to the audience. We actually are plugged in to you. This island hasn't infected us." Beck broadcasts from New York City, island of Manhattan. "I've actually told journalists, 'You know, the best thing you can do is read Twitter and Facebook," explained Beck. "Listen to people. Listen to them. Look what they're talking about. They're onto it. They know the stories better than anybody in journalism. What you have to do is sort through them and see which ones are true and which ones aren't."

He went on...

Activists who toil in the field of helping figure out how people the world over can avoid web restrictions put in place by governments will tell you, happily, that this sort of circumvention is becoming second nature, especially amongst young people in repressive countries. Earlier generations figured out how to send emails; today's up and comers learn how to route around search engine filters and blocked websites. But how? How, as a normal sort of person living in say, Burma, do you acquire that sort of knowledge?

Well, here's some insight from, indeed, Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar), which is looking at its first election in twenty years. No one under the age of 38 has ever vote before, at least not at home. And so they're naturally turning to the Internet to learn about candidates, and how these elections things are supposed to go. The ruling junta isn't enormously favorable to that sort of thing, and those looking for information online run smack into restrictions. But what seems to have sprung up in Burma then, according to a report from AFP, is a shared culture where people are actively helping one another master online circumvention tactics. That might look like a simple Rangoon cybercafe. But it is, actually, a place where people go to learn from one another the art of using proxy servers:

Staff are quick to help clients find proxy servers to bypass blocks on certain websites, even though they are strictly forbidden to do so on threat of closure, according to media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

The rights group describes Myanmar's legislation on Internet use, the Electronic Act, as "one of the most liberticidal laws in the world", with dissident netizens facing lengthy prison terms.

Tin San, who has about 2,000 Facebook friends and thousands more blog followers, says he holds informal gatherings across Yangon to discuss the Internet's uses -- and how to dodge the junta's restrictions.

"Political websites are banned but you can still read them, for example through (web aggregator) Google Reader," is one of his tips. He also offers advice about privacy settings on social networking sites.

Using an plain ol' RSS reader like Google Reader to route around filters and connect to off-limits political sites is fairly basic tactic, but a potentially powerful one. It's a simple hint that can get passed from one person to another, creating a body of knowledge and practice that changes that dynamic between a single person and their government. What's fascinating to think about is what sort of mastery over their online environment young people in restricted countries all over the world are developing, because they have to if they want to stay connected and informed. Anyway, here's the rest of the piece from the AFP.

And while we're on the topic, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Luke Allnutt has a new blog up called Tangled Web, covering "the smart ways people in closed societies are using social media, mobile phones, and the Internet to circumvent their governments." There you go. Go ahead and put in your Google Reader.

• As he explains in the video from Air Force One above, the White House's Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes will be taking the questions from the online public concerning Iraq just following President Obama's Oval Office address on the ending of the U.S.'s combat mission in Iraq. Things kick off at 8pm east coast time.
• Remember the Chris Christie video we talked about, part of the Republican Governors Association online video push, some of which is happening behind a paywall? Well, "A New Jersey" is getting top-drawer treatment, with a premiere next week at DC's E Street Cinema.
• The Internet's making the political polling business more appealing.
• How the hanging of Australia's Parliament played out online: "All of a sudden Twitter became rife with self-taught constitutional law experts."
• One MA candidate's campaigning on the idea that Beacon Hill politicians are only paying lip service to the idea of open government.
• And a Washington Post sports reporter tries to make a point about the unreliability of social media by tweeting out a fake scoop about Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger's suspension. The point he ended up making is that he'll be taking a month off from working for the Washington Post.

Over on Twitter, @gwynnek critiques my post on social media's contribution to the Glenn Beckification of the news cycle by saying that it was only half the story, given that much of what people were saying on social media about his rally on the National Mall was "way negative."

It's a fair point, and useful context. That said, when it comes to way is still, for many people, "mainstream" news coverage like CNN.com, even negative tweets signal to editors that large numbers of people are fixated on a particular happening, and that tone doesn't necessarily carry over into that coverage, only the level of interest. Check out, for example, the 120 results for "Glenn Beck" that pop up on the Washington Post website for the last week. At the very least, that argument fails the "all press is good press" test that seems to apply in Beck's case.