Credit: John Aravosis (from a trip to the White House in February)

Kevin Drum wonders if the sort of semi-off-the-record "blogger" briefing with Tim Geithner and other administration officials the Treasury Department organized for yesterday is really worth putting on the tie and/or good shoes for, as people like Felix Salmon, Megan McArdle, Matthew Yglesias, John Aravosis, Duncan Black, and Sam Stein did. Are these just dog and pony shows? Or does actual news get collected, relationships built, readers served? Writes Drum, who blogs on MotherJones.com:

Was it genuinely interesting, or just a bunch of the same-old-same-old? What's the verdict on this ancient Washington tradition?

The American Prospect's Tim Fernholz, who was part of the the event yesterday, pushes back against some of Drum's assumptions...

Credit: John Aravosis

AMERICAblog's John Aravosis describes a trip to the White House made by nine progressive bloggers and/or reporters yesterday to meet with Vice President Biden's economic advisor, Jared Bernstein.

Credit: The White House

In his call for House and Senate leaders to gather their posses and bring them down to Blair House next Thursday to settle this health care reform matter once and for all, President Obama said that he'll be posting a copy of a health care reform package online ahead of time:

Since this meeting will be most productive if information is widely available before the meeting, we will post online the text of a proposed health insurance reform package. This legislation would put a stop to insurance company abuses, extend coverage to millions of Americans, get control of skyrocketing premiums and out-of-pocket costs, and reduce the deficit. It is the President’s hope that the Republican congressional leadership will also put forward their own comprehensive bill to achieve those goals and make it available online as well.

Jon Cohn suggests that in acceding to expectations of transparency in the health care reform process (the event will be "be broadcast live in its entirety," says the invitation letter, and we've already reported that C-SPAN is champing at the bit) Obama also happens to be putting pressure on House and Senate Democrats to come up with a compromise legislative package by next week, while at the same time putting Republicans in the position of having to bring some ideas to the web or have their complaints about their policy proposals being ignored ring hollow. There's a decent chance we would have seen more cameras involved in the health care reform process earlier on had transparency carried those sort of political pluses.

(One funny note from Obama's invitation. He's clearly hoping for this to be a wonk fest, rather than a complaint session. "It is also important," Obama told Senators and Representatives, "that each of you have one staff member specializing in health care policy in the meeting.")

Credit: USDA/U.S. Army/MTV

Game designers were called to the White House's Truman Room last week to brainstorm. What the White House wants to know is what experts in the field of gaming interaction know that can be used to combat one of the United States' toughest foes: childhood obesity.

The target of the White House gaming project is young Americans in those critical "tween" years of 9 to 12, when many of us develop our eating habits for life. (Here's the attendee list for last week's White House session on gaming, led by U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra.)

Games and government aren't perfect strangers. The USDA, for example, has even experimented with nutrition-based games before; witness "MyPyramid Blast Off," aimed at a slightly younger set. But there's a growing interest both inside and outside government about how richly immersive and expertly crafted gaming experiences can help shape their players' ways of thinking about the world, whether that's the U.S. military's "America's Army" virtual war environment to MTV's choose-your-own-adventure-style "Darfur is Dying" online game to the massively collaborative "World Without Oil" experience.

Chopra is particularly interested in figuring how if small government-funded prizes might encourage game designers to build effective anti-obesity gaming experiences that young people will actually want to play. More here.

With all due sensitivity, the tremendous disaster unfolding in Haiti as a result of Tuesday's earthquake just outside Port-au-Prince is putting the new media and tech experts inside the Obama Administration in what is a familiar place for the many campaign veterans among them: raising money online (often from small donors) and using every tool they know to get word out as quickly and efficiently as possible. But much is new and untested about this situation. And like the rest of us scrambling to confront the Haiti disaster, they're also often making it up as they go along.

The Obama White House has, for its part, taken on the job of sharing the presidential perspective on the crisis, posting footage from briefings with President Obama and, for example, shooting YouTube videos with First Lady Michelle Obama. The White House is also acting as an online clearinghouse, attempting to point to work being done both in and out of government. The latter includes the work being done by the William J. Clinton Foundation to provide relief in Haiti.

Often the work inside government that the White House is pointing to is the efforts of Hillary Clinton's State Department, which perhaps has the most dense collection of new media innovators working in the federal government today...

One place where the Internet has changed American politics most dramatically is where it comes to the political press. In the U.S., media and politics are so completely intertwined as to often be two parts of the same whole. Coverage shapes action, action molds coverage, and personalities in and out of political officialdom mix and mingle to become the most powerful force guiding what comes out of the political process. That's what makes this little dust-up over the admittance of reporters from two "new media" upstarts -- Talking Points Memo's Christina Bellantoni and the Washington Times' Sam Stein -- to the White House press pool so fascinating. Press pool reporters provide coverage where space or other limitations make it difficult for the full White House press corps to participate. The photo above suggests it's glamorous work.

Pool service is something like cooking communal dinner in a group house. And some in the Washington media world aren't happy with who's going to be taking turns doing the cooking...

Even smaller than the fraternity of people who have served as President of the United States is the fraternity of those who have served as the Internet Director to the President of the United States. David Almacy is a member of the latter club, having served under President George W. Bush's tenure, and as we chew over the White House's recent embrace of the Drupal open-source content management system, Almacy has an invaluable post up walking us back through the history of the online White House, back to the days when there was no content management system to speak of.

(Yes, those days did exist. Perhaps today is a good day for those more, ehem, experienced among us to take some time to share with our younger colleagues what it was like back when publishing something online generally required hand coding HTML, and there was one, maybe two people in an organization that could thus do much of anything on the web. Uphill, both ways.)

Back in those days before Drupal, Almacy tells us...

Publisher, conference convener, and lover of animal pen drawings Tim O'Reilly gives us his insight into how the White House just switched from a proprietary content management system whipped up by a federal contractor to one based on Drupal, the free and open source software made by the Internet. Or, more specifically, by people who spend a lot of time on the Internet and like to make and give away software.

There are three things about O'Reilly's analysis that pop out in particular. Consider this fair warning: the first is really, really technical, at least for 98% of the population. O'Reilly gives word that the White House will be using an implementation of Drupal that makes use of what is called the LAMP stack in softwarese. The "L" is for Linux, the open-source operating system. (It'll be of the Red Hat variety, says Tim.) The "A" is for the Apache web server software package, itself open source. Because you're getting the hang of this and realizing we're dealing with an acronym here, we'll just say that rounding things out are MySQL for database stuff and either Perl, Python, or PHP for a programming language. (The trouble with acronyms, perhaps.) The search engine on the site -- on of the very few things that actually might look different to mere mortals post-switch -- is based on Apache Solr. That's a chunk of code that the CNET Network thunked up and then passed back to the Drupal community. That practice of share and share alike is one of the things that makes the open source software movement so special.

Which is, coincidentally, just about the perfect set up for the second thing that jumps out of O'Reilly's post. (Don't worry, this one is understandable for even layfolk.) When the White House's switch to Drupal will really get jazzy and exciting, says O'Reilly, is when...

The idea that the way a presidential budget gets made is by agency administrators submitting their individual funding requests to the President, and then these blokes above hashing out a budget to send to Congress? So Fiscal Year 2010. The Obama Administration is experimenting with, in very limited fashion, letting individual government servants have a say in how the country spends its money. The White House Office of Management and Budget has launched a contest called the Securing Americans Value and Efficiency (or SAVE) Award that gives every federal government employee or federal contractor -- no matter their rank, role, or position -- a chance to tell the White House their ideas for how to reduce overall government spending and save the taxpayers' money.

The one winning employee will have his or her idea included in the 2011 Presidential Budget, and have a one-on-one meeting with their boss -- the President of the United States, that is. (What happens when Congress gets to the budget is, of course, another question.) ...

Surely this is one of the great mysteries wrapped inside an enigma of our day. Robert Gibbs sparked a a bit of a flurry in our niche the other day by saying on C-SPAN that Twitter is blocked in the White House. Gibbs used the Twitter blockade to explain why he, as White House press secretary, isn't in the practice of tweeting his own reflections on life inside the White House.

I noted at the time that Gibbs' interpretation couldn't be the full story. There were clearly holes in this blockade. For one thing, the White House's own account at @whitehouse is regularly updated with notes on the President's schedule, pointers to tweets coming from elsewhere in government, and even the occasional "FTW" celebration. Unless White House staffers were using non-White House computers to conduct official business, somewhere in the Executive Office of the President someone had been connecting up to Twitter. Those folks are in the White House's new media operation, which handles the White House's and Obama's social media profiles and outreach.

Over on Mediaite, Rachel Sklar has done some digging into the situation and concluded "Twitter Not Blocked In White House, As It Turns Out." Indeed, according to White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton, a pair of White House new media staffers -- new media director Macon Phillips and online programs director Jesse Lee -- are updating the White House Twitter feed. But the truth of the matter, says a White House contact, is that that pair of staffers are the exception to White House rule. They are two unrestricted aides out of the couple thousand employees in the Executive Office of the President...