The White House new media team engaged in an interesting first-time-ever sort of thing this afternoon...

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?

President Barack Obama's two-day trip to Ghana this Friday and Saturday -- his first trip to Africa south of the Sahara since taking office in November -- is already setting off considerable excitement on the continent. And that's the case even though the trip is a very brief pop-in to the West African country. Tacking on the trip to the end of his travels to Moscow and then to Italy for the G8 summit, Obama will be in Ghana for some part of July 10th and 11th. Only some small segment of Ghana's 23 million people (not to mention Africa's near one billion people) will be able to see Obama in person during his appearance in the capital city of Accra. And only a tiny sliver of Ghanaians will get a chance to speak to the American president, or even get within hand-shaking distance of him. But the White House new media team is making a go of extending the reach and impact of the presidential stop-in by opening up some high and low tech ways for Ghanaians and all Africans to participate in the trip. Like Obama attempted to do with the multi-lingual, multi-channel plan around his recent Cairo speech on relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world, the White House is hoping to use their tech-savvy to increase the return on the White House's investment in his engagement in Ghana.

Cell phones and SMS texting are common in Ghana, as they are in many places on the continent. But good old radio is still a reliable and tested way of sharing information far and wide to a large swath of the population. Internet access, where it exists, can be painfully slow. (Thing have improved in recent years, but I have a vivid memory of sitting in an Accra cybercafe and holding a pretty good conversation with one of the staff in the span of time between typing www.nytimes.com in the URL box and the site popping up on the screen.) So the White House is taking a sensible multi-pronged approach to reaching Ghanaians. The blend includes SMS -- for both sending messages to the President and getting speech highlights -- and radio -- of both Obama's remarks and his responses to mobile messages, fleshed out with Twitter, Facebook, and live video streaming components. White African's Erik Hersman has the details from the White House:

SMS. We’re launching an SMS platform to allow citizens to submit questions, comments and words of welcome (in English and in French) . Using a local SMS short code in Ghana (1731) , Nigeria (32969) , South Africa (31958) and Kenya (5683), as well as a long code across the rest of the world*, Africans and citizens worldwide will be encouraged to text their messages to the President. SMS participants will also be able to subscribe to speech highlights in English and French. Long numbers for mobile registration pan-Africa: 61418601934 and 45609910343.

This SMS platform is not available to US participants due to the Smith Mundt Act (The act also prohibits domestic distribution of information intended for foreign audiences).

Radio. A live audio stream of the President’s speech will be pushed to national and local radio stations during the speech. After the speech, a taped audio recording of the President’s answers to the SMS messages received will be made available to radio stations and websites. The President hopes to answer a variety of questions and comments by topic and region. The audio recording will also be made available for download on White House website and iTunes.

Video. The speech will be livestreamed at www.whitehouse.gov/live. The embed code for this video is available so you may also host the livestream on any Website.

Online chat. We will host a live web chat around the speech on Facebook (it will be at http://apps.facebook.com/whitehouselive). The White House will also create a Facebook “event” around the speech wherein participants from around the world can engage with one another. A Twitter hashtag (i.e. #obamaghana) will also be created and promoted to consolidate input and reaction around the event.

Hersman also notes that the White House is planning on launching an online trip hub at WhiteHouse.gov/Ghana, scheduled to go live on the 11th.

[VIDEO ABOVE] Obama invited AllAfrica.com reporters Charles Cobb, Reed Kramer and Tamela Hultman to discuss issues facing Africa in advance of the Ghana trip.

I'll admit from the upfront that this post exists almost entirely so that I can tell you how awesome I think Plex is, but I swear to you that it's at least a little bit otherwise relevant to what we're here to do. If perchance you were out enjoying the sunshine this weekend and missed President Barack Obama's weekly address -- this one on job creation under the stimulus -- you have a few choices. You could hop on over to the WhiteHouse.gov blog. You could fire up YouTube. But, my Mac-using friends, you also have a far more graceful and downright awesomer option: Plex. It's a free and open-source fork of the XBox Media Center project, and someone has gone to the trouble of pulling the White House's many video feeds into it. Hook up your Mac (sorry, this is Mac-only software) to your TV box, and you're watching all the Internet has to offer. It's the future of television, and Obama's on it. And on demand.

(With the political hook out of the way, let me offer some advice to those of you tempted to play around with Plex. If you have an iPhone, grab a copy of the Snatch app from the iTunes store and set up the Plex remote. Lean back and operate your Mac from your cell phone. It might not blow your mind, but it blew mine.)

Add one more tick in the column of Obama's departure from protocol when it comes to the White House press corps: it announced first on Twitter that Obama will hold a primetime press conference Wednesday.

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...

Reason TV, which, while affiliated with the libertarian-flavored Reason Magazine, seems to be run by Drew Carey -- yes, the guy from Cleveland with the thick glasses, Mimi's friend -- responds to the White House's call for people to send them an email when someone on the Internet is wrong about health care reform. There's certainly plenty to work with when the country's chief executive asks you to snitch on mean chain emails. Reason chooses to focus on video snippets of Obama saying that if he could game-out a country from scratch he'd advocate a single-payer system. Obama hasn't exactly been secretive about his warm fuzzies towards single-payer. He's said that what he's proposed isn't the ideal, it's what's possible and logical given that so much of our system today is tied to employer-based coverage. He made that argument, in fact, in the White House's July 1st townhall, broadcast live on the White House website.

I get back from vacation (it was excellent -- full of sand, sun, and surf, thanks for asking) to discover that the White House's oppo folks haven't been similarly lolling about the beach, but have instead been busily countering the swirl of rumors, fear tactics, and innuendo that hang like barnacles from its push for a legislative overhaul of how we do health care here in the U.S.

Rumors tend to work because they plant a seed of doubt in our brains. Even the crazy ones...

A bit more on the White House's "Reality Check" offensive against health care rumors, viral emails, and myths. The debunking operation has gone multi-lingual. Well, bi-lingual, at least. A new Spanish-language version of the push is tailored to Hispanic Americans, offering la verdad sobre la reforma del seguro médico.

An estimated 45 million Americans speak Spanish, creating a desirably sizable audience for the White House's outreach. Add to that that nearly a third of Hispanic Americans are uninsured. What you have there, goes the hope, is a ready audience for the White House's new messaging about "stability and security." The approach is heavy on aspiration. The argument goes that health reform is all about creating a reliable bedrock upon which to build prosperous lives in these United States. Or, as they say in Spanish:

Tenga o no seguro médico en este momento, las reformas que estamos procurando le darán la estabilidad y seguridad que no tiene hoy en día. No es cuestión de política. Se trata de la vida de la gente. Se trata de sus empresas. Se trata de nuestro futuro.

Signed Presidente Barack Obama.

The chum was already in the water. The White House's call for "fishy" emails earlier this month had some on the right floating the idea that the Obama Administration was keeping tabs on its political opponents. Rush Limbaugh bandied about the term "snitch website." Fox News Vice President Bill Sammon referred to "some kind of an enemies list." But this weekend turned into a full-on Fox News-fueled feeding frenzy after some Americans found in their inbox an email from senior White House Advisor David Axelrod. Under the subject Something worth forwarding, Axelrod bemoaned "old tactics" against health care reform, like viral emails that circulate under the radar. (The full email text is down below.) Axelrod's new media-savvy counter tactic? "Let's start a chain email of our own."

By the White House's own admission, some people got the Axelrod email who never opted onto a White House email list. Those unwanted emails, coupled with the email monitoring effort, has turned this into scandal du jour on the right. We're at the point in the evolution of this controversy where, this morning, White House new media director Macon Phillips' photo was featured like a mug shot front and center on FoxNews.com...