"Mock not," pleaded blogger Andrew Sullivan as he posted an instaclassic of hyperbole, "The Revolution Will Be Twittered" in praise of Iranian supporters of Mir Hussein Moussavi who took the streets and - in some cases - used the short-form blogging services to post about the scene in Tehran.

Mock on, says I.

There is something like digital catnip on the breakfast bar for western politicogeeks in the story of Iran's disputed election and the ensuing power struggle roiling the Middle East's largest theocracy. Anything that suggests that some of the tools and tricks adopted among the wired, iPhone-wielding politically active classes in the United States may be used to - dramatic pause - start a revolution in one of the world's most dangerous countries carries the potency of a synthetic narcotic injected into the great XML vein of the Internet...

In the blast of social media noise, government warnings, blog posts, and breaking news updates this week on the expanding swine flu epidemic, one link seemed to carry some added weight: Google had posted a collaborative map to track the outbreak on a global basis.

"Follow the Swine Flu Pandemic in Real Time With Google Maps," urged tech blog Gizmodo. The Twitter recommendations were legion. News outlets from MSNBC to the Chicago Tribune cited the online map, with its virtual push-pins linked to suspected and confirmed cases.

Clearly, an example of a new paradigm of crowd-sourced reporting in a crisis, right? Perhaps. But there are a couple of serious problems with the much-hyped Google swine flu map: the Google team didn't put it up, and the map is fantastically inaccurate.

Last week, Secretary Clinton's team at the State Department put up a short post on Dipnote, the departmental blog, asking for suggestions on technology and social media. It asked: "How Might the U.S. Utilize Innovative Technologies To Discuss U.S. Foreign Policy?"

The responses are illuminating and thoughtful, and worth reading by anyone considering the evolution of open government in the digital age.

She's been uncharacteristically quiet since her confirmation as Secretary of State, but the Obama Administration's other rock star seems poised to change all that with her first big overseas trip to Asia - with the help of a Twitter-fueled blog audience that has increased three-fold since Barack Obama's inauguration. And while she inherits massive foreign policy challenges from her predecessor, Hillary Clinton also inherits a new media team at State that's at least a year into remaking America's digital image on the web.

Started under former Secretary Rice - and emphatically seamless, professional and non-partisan in its transition to Secretary Clinton - the expansion of State's online operation seems primed for President Obama's primary international goal: rebuilding the U.S. brand overseas.

It's fascinating to watch major politicians (and their staffs) try to adapt to the direct communications juggernaut that is Twitter. Some seem to grasp its instinctive two-way, multi-directional DNA - but others have their Tweets set firmly on the "outgoing only" box.

Does Gordon Brown have a digital trick or two to show President Obama? As change and greater digital access to information come slowly to the U.S. Government, it's more than worthwhile to delve into a newly-released beta report from the British Cabinet Office's Power of Information Task Force, which aims to reinvent the British people's interaction with their government.

Written by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg. the report is wide-ranging and though-provoking - much of it came together on wiki - and its authors explicitly link their work to the theme of American change: "Early signs from the Obama administration in the USA suggest that digital innovators in the Administration are thinking along about re-use of data along the lines above. "

Where Organizing for America is concerned, pushing a porky (though perhaps necessary) stimulus bill can never be a movement - or rival a Presidential campaign.

But here's something that can: universal health care for every American.

The accepted storyline on President Obama's souped-up hot rod of a super-secure executive branch Blackberry runs like this: Presidents too often exist in a bubble, insulated from real people and the world outside the sturdy White House gates. There's some truth to that, of course, but much of that isolation has tended to be self-inflicted rather than mandated by statute.

While it will undoubtedly help him keep his connection with non-governmental friends and ideas, the Obama Blackberry also has another important function that I'm pretty sure our new President is well aware of: it's an important symbol of access and permission.

In the movies, the President is usually surrounded by technology the rest of us can only imagine - escape pods, hand-held full body scanners, real time satellite video technology to remote regions in the situation room.

But the reality boils down to Windows 2000 and arcane government records laws that haven't been updated since the 70s. As many observers have noted over the last two days, the super-wired campaign operation has run into the slow and somewhat backward technology of the actual West Wing.

Yet, there's one aspect of the big change that should be very much under the control of President Obama's White House geeks: why is the whitehouse.gov web site do darned slow?