MoveOn is rolling out some cool new tools for political organizing, starting with "VotePoke"--an innovative way to get people registered to vote--and ActivList, an event syndication feed.

First Macworld, now the State of the Union. Several times during tonight's SOTU address Twitter's servers were overloaded, preventing users of the popular micro-blogging service from sending or receiving tweets for several minutes at a time.

A scan of Twitter's public timeline during the speech showed a number of tweets about Bush's (hopefully) last address to Congress. But midway through, Twitter's website failed to process new messages and friend requests for several minutes at a time.

I guess it's MoveOn day here at techPres. The giant e-group has just reached into its 2004 playbook and announced an "Obama in 30 Seconds" contest for video makers. The reason? "The race isn't over, and we've got to pull out all the stops to help him across the finish line," the group says.

Go read British Cabinet Officer Tom Watson's speech on the "Power of information" and imagine a Member of Congress making a similar speech on how technology can radically reinvent government. Imagine one of our presidential candidates making it (even Barack Obama, who has done the most thinking on this topic.) You can't. But maybe, if we pay more attention to our cousins across the pond, soon someone will.

Five years ago, Watson was one of the first MPs to blog, and notes that even though it opened him up to daily abuse, "the blog broke down the walls between legislators and electors in a way that interested me. So I persevered." Now he says, "I believe in the power of mass collaboration.... I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made are going to change for ever."

I'm at the Politics Web 2.0 conference at the University of London, Royal Hollaway, and things have just kicked off. As always with my visits to conferences, I will try to blog that which I find interesting (I'm no Ethan Zuckerman) and all my renderings are not verbatim, but rough paraphrasing. Here are my notes on one of the first keynotes, which definitely held my attention. Helen Margetts, of the Oxford Internet Institute, is presenting on "Digital-era Governance: Peer production, Co-creation and the Future of Government." This is one area where the possible impact of the internet has been underestimated, especially within the community, she starts off. These technologies could have a huge meaning for government.

Time for some editorial housekeeping. In our never-ending quest to cover how technology is changing politics and serve the growing community of activists, technologists, journalists, politicians, government workers, bloggers and plain old citizens who are engaged in making this change happen, we are pleased to announce two new additions to our editorial crew. Dave Witzel and Allison Fine are coming on board Personal Democracy Forum as senior editors who will help expand our coverage on PersonalDemocracy.com of how mass, networked participation in the public arena is affecting all the important arenas outside of electoral campaigns (which we cover obsessively at techPresident).

While much of the tech industry and blogosphere is pondering who President-elect Barack Obama might appoint as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer--Eric Schmidt? Jeff Bezos? Larry Lessig?--a bunch of heavy-hitting public interest groups in Washington and a couple of civic-minded techies out in Seattle have each launched promising interventions in the discussion.

The Cliff Notes Version:
(1) WhiteHouse.gov/TV; (2) Weekly Webcast; (3) GovTube; (4) Put Content on Non-Governmental sites; (5) Create New Media, Transparency, and Technology offices in every executive branch agency; (6) Monthly Department Secretaries webcasts; (7) Webcast the Inauguration; (8) Make the State of the Union an interactive multimedia event; (9) Make the President's Annual Budget a digital, multimedia document; (10) Enact all of this and more first by executive order, then through legislation, so future Administrations can't just hard reboot your digital legacy.

For the full version, read on...

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.

[With the federal government in transition, and high expectations for the Obama Administration to revolutionize how government uses the web and other technology to make its processes more open, interactive and effective, we thought it would be interesting to repost this white paper, which was recently posted online by the Federal Web Managers Council. The council is an interagency group of almost 30 senior web managers from the federal government, that includes web directors from every cabinet-level agency, several independent agencies, and representatives from the judicial and legislative branches. It serves as the steering committee for the Web Content Managers Forum, a group of nearly 1,500 government web managers across the country. These folks are on the front-line of how government uses the web--and as you'll see from what follows, they're chomping at the bit to move forward into the Networked Age. The Editors.]