• From the White House Flickr stream: "WASP pilot Bernice Falk Haydu pulls back the chair of President Barack Obama after signing S.614, a bill to award a Congressional Gold Medal to the Women Airforce Service Pilots."
• The White House posts the salaries of some staffers, making use of Socrata ("Making Data Social").
• Maps from the New York Times digital folks: "The Shifting American Footprint in Iraq."
• NedaNet: "We're just computer hackers and computer users from all over the planet doing what we can to help the Iranian people in their struggle for freedom." Why they're needed: "People we talk to inside Iran say that almost no proxies are usable any more." The lesson: "[D]on't wait until the tanks are in the streets to figure this out, because by that point, you may have already lost the proxy war."
• Social media outreach is moving "in baby steps" in Afghanistan, but radio broadcasts of Pashto poetry seem to be well-received.
• Commerce and USDA release guidelines on who can get which money for what and how under the $7 billion broadband provision in the stimulus.
• VA CIO: "We should stop discussing how to move our 1970s-era COBOL systems into Web 2.0. It's not going to happen."
• Tweeting is changing farming.
• And David All is attempting to change tweeting -- or, at least, "have a little bit of fun" with an advocacy campaign targeted at @whitehouse.
• Speaking of using Twitter to advocate and agitate, @BarackObama's asking of folks to "PLS RT" a link to health care stories produced 355 retweets -- about one republishing for every 4,500 followers. (Thanks for the tip, you know who you are.)

That's if for me until Tuesday, folks, as I'm tacking on an extra day to the holiday. Enjoy your weekend.

(With Micah Sifry; White House photo by Pete Souza)

Via TechRepublican, we have video of RNC new media director Todd Herman's presentation at PdF '09 earlier this week. Herman's talk certainly caught attention, but what was also fascinating was to take in the reactions to it amongst the conference crowd. Our Andrew Rasiej described the audience as falling about 80% on the left side of the political spectrum and 20% on the right, but the more interesting split might have been between the political and the technological. While generalizing is generally a dumb thing to do, one impression take from the contemporaneous Twitter stream was that some more tech-minded folks applauded Herman's words about making transparency a "purple issue" while the more political amongst the crowd tended towards skepticism of the idea of a more open Republican Party.

But that's admittedly just a crude read, and you don't take my word for it. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, you can watch Herman's preso while reading the Twitter stream and it will seem as though it were happening in real time. Wow.

The congressionally-mandated Public Interest Declassification Board is making use of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy's blog to collect public input on government-wide reform of how we approach the classification of information, as part of an attempt to deal with the secrecy-inflation in recent years that has seen every order form for a new carton of printer paper marked "Top Top Secret." At the moment, PIDB is most interested in figuring out whether it would help matters to establish a National Declassification Center. Join the discussion.

The first half-hour of yesterday's 70-minute presidential health reform event at Northern Virginia Community College was given over to a pair of introduction and then opening remarks from President Barack Obama. The White House collected more than 450 video questions through YouTube in the days leading up to the event. Obama answered three of them. Not many, to be sure. But then again, a total of just eight questions on the proposed overhaul of the American health care system got asked in the hour-plus session, regardless of whether they came by video, via Twitter, or in the flesh...

In a half-hour live chat conducted on the White House website and Facebook, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra and White House new media director Macon Phillips explained the inspiration for and mechanics of a new federal tech spending oversight site that debuted at PdF '09 earlier this week. IT.USAspending.gov offers a portal onto agency spending data on high-dollar federal technology investments. During the live chat, Phillips pulled in questions from the Internet. (One the chat got rolling, Facebook questions, said Phillips, were coming in "fast and furious.") Kundra answered them -- including an intriguing little riff on how every new historical transformation in the nature of technology compels government to adapt, either to merely survive or, hopefully, to thrive.

Coming in at just under 30 minutes, true geeks are going to want more detail on the Kundra approach to data-enabled management. Most normal human beings are going to want less. But this lunch-time sized session of engagement is a low-bar way to include the greatest possible swath of citizens in the changing nature of government.

• Above is one of the few hundred video submissions for today's White House health care forum, this one on the feasibility of preventing a mass rush to a public option. This is the world we live in now: you can ask the American president a timely policy question without having to get out of bed.
• YouTube opens up call-to-action overlays.
• The Sunlight Foundation has launched what it's calling Transparency Corps. Devote a couple spare cycles to vetting earmark requests and other tasks that computers still need us humans to tackle.
• Prediction: social media leaderboards (i.e., displays of "top users" and the like like we used on Twitterslurp) are, for better or for worse, the next big, big thing.
• From yesterday at PdF, Facebook's Randi Zuckerberg responded to the nagging question of whether Mir Hossein Mousavi's Facebook profile is actually his own. "It looks like it's an official page," she said, "but...you know."
• The CIA website makes a clickity-clickity noise. (Thanks Shaun Dakin)
• Arne Duncan announces a new, simpler web-based FAFSA.
• Russia wants an international cybersecurity treaty. The U.S. isn't so keen on the idea.
• And New York Observer's Felix Gillette has a thought-provoking look at how the TV networks handled broadcasting the video of Neda Agha-Soltan's death. Said one exec: "By telling our viewers that it's on YouTube, anybody who is watching our broadcast could go and watch the video if they're so inclined."

Once again, President Barack Obama will be taking questions from the Internet. Saying "inaction is not an option," Obama announced through a YouTube video that the White House will today host one of their special-blend online townhalls that mixes together Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and live video streaming on White House Live. The special guest? The president himself. The subject? What Americans are wrestling with when it comes to health care costs, coverage, and choice. Obama will field some of the questions plucked by his staff from the more than 450 YouTube responses to his announcement, as well as Twitter and Facebook feeds. Health care staff will reportedly be on hand to field stumpers, and the White House promises to follow up with some of the questions that they don't get to today. The event starts at 1:15pm EDT, but head on over to Facebook now to watch as they set the stage and prepare for the event. It's not entirely clear that they're aware that the camera is already on.

The White House is promoting today's online town hall by posting some of the YouTube video responses smack dab in the middle of the WhiteHouse.gov home page. Is that you, top left?

Attempts to do political fundraising on Twitter has proceeded in fits and starts, but the Democratic online fundraising clearinghouse ActBlue has announced that anyone with a personal profile on their site can now contribute via tweet:

Friday evening, we released new software that connects our fundraising platform with Twitter. We started with our popular ActBlue Express that allows contributors to save a profile, make contributions to candidates or fundraising pages with just a few clicks, and review their full giving history. What's new is connecting that profile to Twitter: now allowing donors to give by just tweeting the candidate's Twitter screen name and an amount. We'll respond with a thank you note and you'll see the usual email receipt in your inbox.

The format: "donate $amount @candidate via @actblue" -- more details here. (Image via ActBlue)

Well, at least the first batch of recaps, reminiscences, and assessments of the just wrapped Personal Democracy Forum 2009 are starting to bubble up. But don't spend all day trawling the Internet looking for commentary. I'm here for you. Let me do it. We'll highlight more as they come in, but here's a few to get us started:

• Rory O'Connor has a run down of the whole program, which is a great overview if you weren't able to attend. He writes: "[N]o one questions any longer the primacy of the Internet and its attendant technologies. Instead, attention is now shifting toward how best to use these emerging media -- and the social networks that power them -- to transform the body politic."
• The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Chou covers yesterday's conversation of journalists about what, if any, role Twitter played in the Iranian uprising. Chou quotes the New York Times' Frank Rich: "As great as Twitter was for getting the story out, it overstated the revolution."
• Wired's Shelley Dubois reports that media anthropologist Michael Wesch wowed the crowd with his ethnography of "whatever." (If you caught Wesch's preso, here, for your re-viewing pleasure is "Charlie Bit Me" and attendant remixes. The original video has been viewed 105 million times. Million. I was an anthro major, so I know that the term of art in the field for that is insane.)
• The Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas highlights the reception of the "King of Geek," otherwise known as U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra. Vargas makes a lovely allusion to the fact that holding the event in the Jazz at Lincoln Center space was fitting, giving all the riffing and creative experimentation that went on.
• Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America's executive director Paul Rieckhoff, who has been pushing for veterans' rights creatively and persistently for some time now, was interviewed at PdF by Eric Kuhn about how IAVA uses Ning.
• Air America Media shot a bunch of video with attendees and presenters. Have a look. And we've got some videos ourselves, with more to come.
• The final tally of PdF '09 related tweets comes in at about 18,600, from more than 3,000 different folks. Amazing.
• And there was an entirely sensible act.ly petition floating around asking that next year's PdF not start at the unholy hour of 8:30 in the morning. It was barely light out! If you can find that petition, or if you started it, please pass along a link.

Please, by all means, add links in the comments to your own or your favorite reviews.

By just about any measure, it's already been a rather remarkable second day of Personal Democracy Forum 2009 in New York City, where we've been hearing directly from some of the people at the white-hot center of tech-empowered political, social, and economic change -- as well as some of the thinkers with the most unique perspectives on that change. And in case there was any question going into the event, the verdict is clear: this conference will be tweeted. Hard. An astonishing 15,000 PdF-tagged tweets have flowed in the last day and a half, coming from more than 2,700 people (which, interestingly, is far more people than the number of folks physically present here in the Jazz at Lincoln Center space).

And you can dive into the full Twitter stream here. Be forewarned, though, that it this point the stream has swelled into an ocean of content. Lucky for us, it's belatedly occurred to me that we can with a few handy-dandy search terms parse out the tweets emanating from particular sessions from this morning's line-up. So, go ahead and catch up on the conversation around what we're learning about innovating from within government that featured the White House's Vivek Kundra (from whom we get our title above), Macon Phillips, and Beth Noveck. Then catch up on the discussion around presentations by State Department's Alec Ross on citizen-centered diplomacy, Facebook's Randi Zuckerberg on social networks and social revolution, Michael Wesch on YouTube culture and authenticity, Mark Pesce on the culture of sharing, Todd Herman on "tak[ing] the lid off" of the Republican Party, and Dan Froomkin on the journalism of accountability.

For a taste of longer coverage, the Wall Street Journal's Marisa Taylor reviews the "battle over broadband," Kundra's unveiling of a new IT spending dashboard was covered by the Washington Post's Kim Hart, Fast Company's Kit Eaton, NextGov's Gautham Nagesh. The Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Chou covers a discussion on the youth vote. And Write Like She Talks' Jill Zimon has been doing good work compiling live blogs of this morning's sessions, and she'll be powering through a number of this afternoon's break-out panels as well. For more coverage, check out what Google News and Google Blog Search turn up about today's events.

(Photo by magnifynet...and, okay, okay, it was take yesterday. Tag your more recent photos with "pdf09," folks)