The state of our Union is thirsty

• The White House rolled out a tool for the State of the Union address that asked people to select which lines in President Barack Obama's remarks they responded to and why.

• CNN has aggregated SOTU responses on Twitter.

• More people seemed to care about Sen. Marco Rubio's thirsty lunge for an off-camera water bottle during his response to the president's remarks than about what the Republican Party's spokesman that night actually had to say.

• Rubio took it in stride.

• On NBC's Good Morning America, he said: "I mean I needed water, what am I going to do?"

• In response to Obama's powerful line on gun control, "they deserve a vote," Matt Ortega has (of course) created a microsite.

When we say "fail fast," is this what we mean?

• The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation launched its news challenge on open government yesterday.

• They asked serial plagiarist and fabulist Jonah Lehrer to speak about decision-making during a meeting about information needs of communities, also held Tuesday.

• They paid him $20,000.

• It "turned out to be significantly more about himself than I had expected,” Knight President Alberto Ibargüen said. He also said $20,000 was a non-controversial sum for an honorarium. Of the speech, he added: "I was happy with it," reports the Washington Post's Erik Wemple, "because people stayed riveted, people were discussing both the speech, the emotion of it, the Twitter feed that played right with it. And then, 15, 20, 30 minutes, later pockets of people were still standing around discussing it.”

• There are journalists who are lucky to make $20,000 in a year.

• Civic hacking has a robust community of supporters with a lot of enthusiasm. But there are also obstacles, pitfalls and proven bad ideas that people don't seem to want to talk about for fear of scaring off newcomers.

"Cyber" security

• President Barack Obama signed his long-promised order on cybersecurity.

• It's time to stop using the term "cyberspace", which we agree is a term invented to describe something that didn't exist when William Gibson wrote "Neuromancer," and is now used to describe a ubiquitous and well-understood global communications network. So perhaps it's no longer constructive to fantasize about "cyberspace" and "cybersecurity," and instead discuss a more pressing — and sobering — issue: The militarization, and Balkanization, of the global Internet.

• Here's another view on why it might be time to give up "cyberspace".

Around the web

• A new, high-powered startup promises to connect people with lots of money to other people with lots of money.

• This zoning map of Chicago has been color-coded to look like it's from SimCity.

• A popular app based in China but used elsewhere in Asia is running into problems because of Chinese censorship rules.

• The European Public Sector Information Platform announced that a new contest, "Apps4Norge" — that's Norway, guys — has launched.

• The Sunlight Foundation has started digging in to the data about American cities and making the case for government transparency.

• The Texas Tribune has run into trouble in its efforts to investigate state pensions.

• Barcelona is working on an app to improve data collection during voting.