In January, not only will we have the first African American President, but we have the first "Tech President" as has been said many times before on this blog.

With that, there are a lot of questions being discussed at Obama HQ, in the transition, on this blog, and all over the tubes – what to do with Obama's list? What to do with BarackObama.com? What to do with WhiteHouse.gov? Will President Obama use the internet to make government more transparent (I bet former Blue State Digital partner Clay Johnson and the Sunlight Foundation have a few ideas on that), and how can the President-Elect use all this to be a better President? And many more questions.

The next White House Web site should tell us a lot about whether Obama believes what he has said about bringing transparency and accountability to the government.

Letting Us in to the White House; Conventional Wisdom Turns Against CEOs as CTO; Busting Out of the "Finest Prison in the World;" Building the Post-Obama Movement; NASA's Filling CIO Position at the Speed of Light; How Did Times Readers Do in Their Cabinet Bets?; and a good deal more.

Dozens of senior web managers spanning federal agencies from USDA to HUD to NASA to EPA to ASDF (okay, we made that last one up) have penned a useful white paper with recommendations for the next presidential administration...This latest and last video installment of the life and times of Barney, the White House dog, is truly something to behold. The Bush family gathers to celebrate Christmas in this stilted and scripted piece, and you have to get a load of the President acting out some intentionally goofy lines, like when he admonishes his pet to quit "nappin' to the finish"...If you ever get the question from colleagues, allies, or clients, "We want to get all web 2.0 up in this piece. Hmm, where do we start?," then we've got something for you...and more.

Releasing the official portrait of the incoming president, the Obama team made special note of the fact that it's the first presidential photo portrait taken with a digital camera. (American presidents, it seems from my digging, make do with an official photo until their out of office, at which point they're rewarded with a painted portrait that then goes to the National Gallery archives.) One thing of note: they've released the raw photo in all its 1900px × 2600px digital glory. Brave man, because at that size, you can see clearly every pore and stray thread.

At 12:01pm Eastern time, as promised, the whitehouse.gov domain flipped over and we received our first glimpse of what's to come over the next four years. Take a look!

As Sarah noted yesterday, the White House website got a facelift at 12:01 yesterday as the typically stuffiness of the White House web site smacked headlong into the calming blues of the Obama campaign/transition sites.

I thought I'd take a moment and share some thoughts.

From a design and technical standpoint, the site is fine. It's fairly light on content (and it's all static), but they're less than 24 hours in, so what can you really expect.

Recognizing that the site is content light, and technically "adequate" what else is there to talk about before they add depth? Well, that leads to most of my discussion...

• While it might not have been until a few minutes after noon that Barack Obama and John Roberts got that oath of office thing sorted out, the White House New Media team was ready to go on time...
• Footage of Sunday's "We Are One" concert at the Lincoln Memorial has been pulled down from YouTube, with shots of Pete Seeger and Challenger, the bald eagle who wouldn't fly, replaced by "this video is no longer available due to a copyright claim" notices...
• He's keeping the Blackberry, reports someone who ought to know...
• And more.

The Obama Administration took its first major steps toward implementing its promise to make government more open and transparent, with two presidential memoranda covering freedom of information, transparency and open government. The first memo directing all agencies to "adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure." This is a 180-degree turn from the policies of the Bush Administration. Most interesting for e-democracy fans: The memo says "all agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government."

The second memo reiterates those points, and adds more detail. It calls for information about government operations and decisions to be put online, and urges departments and agencies to get public feedback on the information of the greatest interest to the public. Even more promising, in an explicit tip-of-the-hat to "web 2.0," the memo states...

As the tech community poured over the new whitehouse.gov site, one of the first subterranean changes noted was that of a file most people would never notice called robots.txt. This file serves as a notice to search robots informing them of what files they should or shouldn't survey. Upon seeing the new version of the file, some noticed that it only had two lines of code excluding robot searches vs. the former whitehouse.gov robots.txt that had nearly 2400 lines of exclude lines by the end of the Bush administration, sparking excitement and controversy over what the change means in terms of government transparency.