History's Lessons for a Wired White House...Tracking the Evolution of Change.gov...Incoming Administration Faces Information Overload...Palin's Unstoppable Online Power...Just How Historic Was Obama's Presidential Run?...American Diplomacy in the Age of Facebook...and more.

Change.gov's Open for Questions feature opened for business just yesterday morning, as I reported. Already, its first scandal! A few dozen queries about the suddenly infamous deal-making governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, are being "censored," writes Politico's Ben Smith...The Obama campaign has been hitting its email list plenty hard over the last few days, hawking, on behalf of the Democratic National Committee, everything from $35 four-year calendars to a rather cute knit cap, yours for $25 or more...Former Clinton Administration Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, who knows a thing or two about uncomfortable White House sexual situations, says on VanityFair.com that a recent Facebook photo of Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau fondling a cardboard version of a certain member of his boss's cabinet-to-be, "is no laughing matter"...and much more.

She's been uncharacteristically quiet since her confirmation as Secretary of State, but the Obama Administration's other rock star seems poised to change all that with her first big overseas trip to Asia - with the help of a Twitter-fueled blog audience that has increased three-fold since Barack Obama's inauguration. And while she inherits massive foreign policy challenges from her predecessor, Hillary Clinton also inherits a new media team at State that's at least a year into remaking America's digital image on the web.

Started under former Secretary Rice - and emphatically seamless, professional and non-partisan in its transition to Secretary Clinton - the expansion of State's online operation seems primed for President Obama's primary international goal: rebuilding the U.S. brand overseas.

Last week, Secretary Clinton's team at the State Department put up a short post on Dipnote, the departmental blog, asking for suggestions on technology and social media. It asked: "How Might the U.S. Utilize Innovative Technologies To Discuss U.S. Foreign Policy?"

The responses are illuminating and thoughtful, and worth reading by anyone considering the evolution of open government in the digital age.

In an exit interview with the new Public Diplomacy Magazine, former State Department point person on online/offline diplomacy James Glassman reports, "In my humble opinion Web 2.0 has completely changed this game." But with Bush-appointee Glassman taking leave of Foggy Bottom, there has been some questioning inside and outside State of how well his Facebook/YouTube/Twitter-powered "Public Diplomacy 2.0" had a place in Hillary Clinton's universe. The Associated Press's Matthew Lee, at least, sees signs that PD 2.0, as Glassman liked to call it, is a natural fit for the Clinton era. "In less than three months, Clinton's State Department has embarked on a digital diplomacy drive," he writes, "aimed at spreading the word about American foreign policy and restoring Washington's image."

In the handful of weeks of Clinton's tenure thus far, reports Lee, State started or juiced a number of new-media projects. Clinton's State Department launched an multimedia-enhanced Google map of her global jaunts. They've been experimenting with a "Text the Secretary" mobile feature that allows anyone to pose a question when she's on the road (though questions like "How was your trip?" aren't exactly provocative.) And they've kept the well-produced DipNote blog rolling along. Clinton also plans to expand upon X-Life, a mobile phone game that aims to bring the English language and American culture to the Middle East. ("Salah Moaveni has received the opportunity of a lifetime, an international exchange program to International University in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, USA... He will maneuver around the University, learning about the local culture, in order to take on trivia challenges, complete quests, and modify a project car to road-race against a bullying school tyrant called The Zephyr.")

And Clinton aide Cheryl Mills says things like "New media is critical in this new era of diplomacy, where smart power and expanded dialogues are essential to achieving our foreign policy goals." All of which is no doubt pleasing to the good folks at the Hillary Grassroots Campaign. Did Condoleezza Rice have a fan club like that?

The State Department has announced that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will host a "Digital Town Hall of the Americas" just before this weekend's 5th Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. The "town hall" portion of the events, says State, will consist of Clinton taking questions submitted online, while she's on a stopover in the Dominican Republic on her way to meet Haitian President René Préval. Clinton hits the DR Friday. State's press release came out midday yesterday. That suggests that this event went from planning to execution very quickly. In fact, State has released few details about how one goes about putting questions to Clinton before the event, beyond some general mentions of Ustream, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Orkut, and something called Hi-5.

But there's a case to be made that State has made a branding error here. Secretary Clinton's "town hall" might be the least interesting part of how State is using multimedia to open up what should be a diplomatically important meeting. The 34 democratically-elected leaders of western hemisphere countries, including President Barack Obama will be meeting to hammer out agreements on the rather vital topic of energy security and environmental sustainability in a time of global economic instability. Past summits -- 1994 in Miami, 1998 in Chile, 2001 in Quebec City, and 2005 in Argentina -- saw concrete working agreements emerge. For example, at was at a Summit of the Americas that the United States and the countries of Latin and South America worked out an arrangement to drop the processing fees on remittances (cash sent home by those living abroad) down from extortionist heights to more manageable levels. Before you start marveling about my intimate knowledge of the history of Summits of the Americas gone by, stop. All that good knowledge and much more is found in a video that the State Department and the up-and-coming HowCast has put together to introduce us to the event. There's another one that makes the case of how I, as an American in the broadest sense, will be impacted by what happens in Port of Spain this weekend. Standard issue State Department propaganda, perhaps. But it's still good information that a citizen of the world want to know. Civic education goes down easily when it comes in the form of well-produced chunks of web video.

The State Department's decision to go the participatory route, no matter how rushed a choice it might have been, signals that State embraces the idea that there's a role for the American public how the United States engages abroad. State, it's worth noting, is actually putting up a promising game online across the board. For one thing, they post full videos of spokesperson Robert Wood's daily press briefings, like the one above, the same day they take place. (As a point of comparison, WhiteHouse.gov posts Robert Gibbs' daily briefings only in transcript form.) The State Department online hub for the summit will live at townhall.america.gov. The will, they say, be posting on-the-scene video interviews with world leaders as the summit takes place.

Yesterday, the White House announced the nomination of Judith A. McHale to the position of Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the State Department. That's a post of particular interest for us here because under the tenure of former Under Secretary James Glassman we saw State experimenting with what Glassman called "Public Diplomacy 2.0" -- that is, engaging with adversaries and allies around the world through Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other (local and global) high tech mediums in popular use by targeted populations.

But McHale's nomination for the "R" post, as the Under Secretary's slot is known in the secret language of Foggy Bottom, is causing some public diplomacy (PD) advocates some serious agita. The tension in R's role in state is between marketing the American message abroad -- the path that could be said to have been taken by Karen Hughes, the first holder of the post [SEE CORRECTION BELOW] -- and engaging in strategic two-way conversations with the global community, aided where appropriate by the agile use of technology. Glassman went the latter route.

McHale is a former executive with Discovery Communication, the parent company of the Discovery Channel. According to the White House press release, she has worked extensively to broaden Discovery's reach in Africa, Latin America, and Western Europe. McHale also happens to be a generous Democratic donor. The Washington Post's Al Kamen refers to McHale as a "longtime friend" to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a "Democratic mega-donor."

McHale's apparent lack of diplomatic experience has George Washington University's Mark Lynch calling her nomination "a terrible, terrible selection." (Lynch concedes that "I don't know Judith McHale at all, and obviously have nothing against her personally.") As National Journal's Amy Harder points out, Glassman is less judgmental on his blog. He calls Lynch's criticisms "unfair." The big question, writes Glassman, is "what she thinks the job is." Pending her Senate confirmation, we will, he notes, "soon find out."

Of course, the buck stops with Secretary Clinton on setting the model for how tech-powered public diplomacy will fare in the Obama-era White House. There are signs that she's eager to grow State's PD 2.0 efforts. Tomorrow, in fact, Clinton will be engaging in a "Digital Town Hall" in conjunction with HowCast -- a relationship started under Glassman's tenure.

CORRECTION: An astute reader to point out that I was completely and totally in error calling Karen Hughes the first person to hold the Under Secretary of Public Diplomacy. I misrembered and regret the mistake. Now's a good a time as any to review who's actually held the position. From the State Department:

Name: Evelyn Simonowitz Lieberman
Appointment: Oct 1, 1999
Termination of Appointment: Jan 19, 2001

Name: Charlotte L. Beers
Appointment: Oct 1, 2001
Termination of Appointment: Mar 28, 2003

Name: Margaret DeBardeleben Tutwiler
Appointment: Dec 15, 2003
Termination of Appointment: Jun 16, 2004

Name: Karen P. Hughes
Appointment: Aug 2, 2005
Termination of Appointment: Dec. 14, 2007

Name: James K. Glassman
Appointment: Nominated Dec. 11, 2007

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is set to participate in a live "digital town hall," where she'll take questions submitted to her through Twitter, Facebook, and other means, while on a stop over in the Dominican Republic on her way to the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. The format's fairly similar to that of the Internet-powered "Open for Questions" town hall President Barack Obama held a few weeks back. That affair was, by general consensus, a bit stilted and forced. To see how Clinton handles the novel format, have a watch above.

Representatives of Google, YouTube, Twitter, Blue State Digital, MeetUp, Automattic/WordPress and other well-known American social technology companies currently have boots on the ground in Iraq, according to a press release from the State Department that targets the group's mission as "explor[ing] new opportunities to support Iraqi government and non-government stakeholders in Iraq’s emerging new media industry," such as it is. The group includes YouTube director of product development Hunter Walk, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Blue State vice president David Nassar, and MeetUp's Scott Heiferman.

Below is the full list of members of the delegation, running from April 19 to April 23. (You might notice that the trip manifest comes up a bit light on participants of the female variety -- as in, not a one.)

• Jason Lieberman, Chief Executive Officer-Founder, Howcast
• David Nassar, Vice President, Blue State Digital
• Scott Heiferman, Chief Executive Officer, MeetUp
• Raanan Bar-Cohen, Vice President, Automattic/WordPress
• Richard Robbins, Director of Social Innovation, AT&T
• Jack Dorsey, Chairman-Founder, Twitter
• Kannan Pashupathy, Director of International Engineering Operations, Google
• Ahmad Hamzawi, Head of Engineering, Middle East/North Africa, Google
• Hunter Walk, Head of Product Development, YouTube
• Steven Levy, Senior Writer, Wired Magazine

Gathering together representatives of the U.S.'s most talked about (if not most profitable) about technology firms and sending them to spread some American tech magic in Iraq seems to be the brainchild of the State Department's Jared Cohen, described by the New Yorker in a profile two years ago as Foggy Bottom's "precocious...party starter." Cohen is also known for pulling together the Alliance of Youth Movements, a nascent State Department initiative aimed at supporting the global youth's use of social media to create social change.

Here's the full text of the State Department's press release announcing the trip:

The Department of State is facilitating the travel to Baghdad, Iraq of a delegation of nine senior high-technology company representatives Sunday, April 19 to April 23. This will be the first delegation of its kind to Iraq. While in Iraq, the group will explore new opportunities to support Iraqi government and non-government stakeholders in Iraq’s emerging new media industry.

The delegation includes a mix of CEOs, Vice-Presidents and senior representatives from AT&T, Google, Twitter, Howcast, Meetup, You Tube, Automattic/Wordpress, and Blue State Digital. During their visit to Iraq, they will provide conceptual input as well as ideas on how new technologies can be used to build local capacity, foster greater transparency and accountability, build upon anti-corruption efforts, promote critical thinking in the classroom, scale-up civil society, and further empower local entities and individuals by providing the tools for network building. As Iraqis think about how to integrate new technology as a tool for smart power, we view this as an opportunity to invite the American technology industry to be part of this creative genesis.

During the trip the delegation will meet with representatives from the Government of Iraq, the public and private education sectors, Iraqi technology companies, and groups active in Iraqi civil society.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a strong proponent of using the full range of tools, including emerging new media and communication technologies, to leverage capabilities that will allow for diplomacy not just with governments, but also with people and between different societies.

(Photo credit: HoboTraveler.com)

(Photo by Scott Heiferman)

You might remember that about a dozen representatives of American new (and newish) media companies -- YouTube, Twitter, Google, Howcast -- recently headed over to Baghdad as part of a State Department delegation. The participants are back in the U.S. and have now done a debrief. In sum, the three-day trip seems to have left them impressed by the Iraqi government, enthusiastic about the prospect of a new and better Iraq, and in awe of the service of the U.S. government employees who are working to help rebuild the country. Below are some choice bits from the briefing.

Jared Cohen, the State Department representative who arranged the trip, explained the thinking behind the "fact-finding mission":

The purpose of this trip, first and foremost, is, you know, again -- these people around here, they're not going to Iraq in their business hat. They're going to Iraq in their expert hat. And it's first and foremost a fact-finding mission. We're just trying to get a sense of what the lay of the land is in terms of the digital environment in Iraq. So right now, it's about identifying what the opportunities are, what the challenges are. You know, at the end of the day, what we're looking to do is, you know, figure out, you know, what the Iraqi Government needs in terms of capacity building, in terms of support for what it's trying to do on the ground in Iraq and see if, you know, staffing the tools and those of the expertise could help them actually achieve that.