In the beginning, the blog on Change.gov looked like entirely neutered version of what passes for a blog looks in the rest of the world. Soulless early posts like "President-Elect Obama...Calls for 'Swift Action' on the Economy" left me wondering if we'd just witnessed the birth of yet another press-release blog.

And while Change.gov's blog posts are still penned by some unnamed staffer and there's no way to drop a comment either on the posts themselves or any of the videos on the site, some of the more recent posts raise hopes that Team Obama gets that the Internet has value as an almost-instantaneous feedback loop between the man in the Oval Office and the people he's elected to serve (especially after he's forced to power-down his beloved Blackberry).

One recent post was billed as "advice for the President-elect" and summarized the wisdom of the American people, ranging from the policy guidance of Nina in Pittsburgh that the Obama Administration should dedicate time and energy to tackling the issues of work-life balance and telecommuting, to the recommendation from Greg in Texas that the First Family get a poodle.

It's not entirely clear how, exactly, that home-grown advice made its way to Obama transition HQ. But a second post -- and perhaps the bloggiest on the transition blog so far -- posts the results from the American Moment web form the team posted in the early going. Marcia from Caldwell, New Jersey, for example, wrote in with an account of how she and a neighbor she'd never talked to "exchanged high-fives" over Obama's candidacy. Team Obama called for Americans' stories, and closed the circle by posting what they got back.

That sort of feedback loop may be a defining characteristic of the 'net -- and, in fact, might be one of its best assets -- but it's been far less a feature of Washington in the pre-Obama days.