No, not really. Instead, we look at the seemingly instantaneous response yesterday to the hubbub over where John McCain hangs his hat(s); C-SPAN does a convention-inspired upgrade, pulling in an impressive amount of third-party creative content; we challenge you to record your electoral vote predictions; and a tremendous amount more.

I gave a talk tonight discussing 10 years in the future, internet and politics, what it might produce. In researching the talk I found some current day political spores. Spore, for those who haven't followed, is a massive single player online game, sort of like facebook for rapidly evolving avatar-beast creatures, where you get to constantly update yourself, in the face of evolutionary challenges. (Spore-players, please correct me.)

How often do you think MoveOn's Adam Green and conservative firebrand Grover ("drown it in the bathtub") Norquist are of one mind? Trust me, not that often. But Norquist has just jumped on the bi-partisan Open Debate Coalition train led by Green, Change Congress's Larry Lessig, and others; No matter whether the thought of Sarah Palin as the next President of the United States puts a smile on your face or a chill up your spine, you have to admire excellent Flash work where you find it; The SEIU HQ down in DC has been busy putting together something of a web all-star team; and much more.

Washington Post tech reporter Kim Hart, whose piece on Vivek Kundra is probably the defining profile of the former DC CTO, has brought us the latest: Kundra will be appointed by President Obama to the newly-created position of federal Chief Information Officer.

Tim O'Reilly tweeted the news: "Vivek is a rock star!" And now, it seems, he's a rock star with budgetary authority! As Hart has it, the Google-apps loving, happiness-index-embracing, data-democratizing Kundra will have total budgetary authority over the government's technology spending. This supercharged federal Chief Information Officer slot, she writes, will also have the power to kill projects -- no matter where in the bowels of DOD or EPA or DHS they might happen to lurk. And he'll also have the mandate to launch intragovernmental projects where he sees fit. Kundra had been rumored to fill Karen Evans' old e-government administrator slot at the Office of Management and Budget, a job that has been around for decades. As Hart paints it, the federal Chief Information Officer job seems to be a significant increase in the scope of his portfolio and a meaningful boost in institutional authority.

That's a tall order. To slay rogue defense contractors and tame intra-agency IT projects run amok, a CIO would need a strong ally in the White House. Obama, of course, has framed the smart use of connective technologies as not only integral to his style of campaigning campaign style, but a thread running throughout his post-millennium governing ideology. It's good to have a friend in the Oval Office. That said, it's not exactly clear at one point in the process, for example, even a high-profile federal CIO could have dipped his or her fingers into, say, the FBI and said "this $100 million virtual case file system is dead to me. Be gone!"

Hart and others have also reported that the still open position of federal Chief Technology Officer will likely focus on advising the Obama White House on matters of technology policy. The CTO job has been rumored to be housed in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. That office, part of the Executive Office of the President, serves to advise the president on the impact of science and technology on the country.

UPDATE: The White House just sent out a press release confirming Kundra's appointment. Text of the release after the jump.

The White House recently took a sizable step in the direction of openness by putting up a handy online form through which anyone can request the financial and ethics disclosure forms for White House officials. Type in the name of an official, and zip! A pdf of the documents is soon waiting in your inbox. But the Internet, she's not so fond of waiting, nor one-off requests. Like OpenCRS did for Congressional Research Service reports, ProPublica is compiling a one-stop shop for those docs. It's a project under the direction of Amanda Michel, ProPublica's new editor of distributed reporting who was formerly with the Huffington Post's Off the Bus.

The White House disclosure forms collected by ProPublica list in which mutual funds officials have money, from where they're collecting paychecks, and other accountings of their assets and income -- distributed out across wide bands of dollar value. The ethics letters detail which stock options they have to give up, boards they have to leave, and consulting shops they have to shutter. Also marked are the notes of "reviewing officials" on whether the official's financial status is on the up and up. Scrawled on the form of one assistant to the president: "Per [illegible] representative, all conflicting stocks have been sold as of 4/1/09."

Looks like instead of mocking Nancy Scola, we owe her kudos for predicting all the way back in November that Obama's pick for the nation's first Chief Technology Officer would be "someone out of the small but vibrant government CTO world, like Virginia's able Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra." Well, Nancy gets the cake, as word has leaked that indeed Chopra is stepping into the post. A quick look at Chopra suggests this is very good news for the transparency movement, as well as advocates of collaborative governance and using technology to innovate how government works.

The reviews are in, and Aneesh Chopra is a hit! In comments being emailed around by the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the apparent perch for the new U.S. CTO, venture capitalist extraordinaire John Doerr calls it "an inspired appointment." Intel's Craig Barrett praises Chopra as "one of technology’s leading lights." And Google's Eric Schmidt calls him "the perfect choice for the Nation's first CTO." They seem pleased.

Micah has covered what Chopra's appointment might spell for the future of open government. As much as Chopra might be a natural ally for CIO Vivek Kundra, he might prove to be just as a good a friend to another Obama appointee, FCC Chair appointee Julius Genachowski. When he served as Secretary of Technology for the state of Virginia, Chopra was known for his energetic cheerleading around the rollout of broadband to the state's hardest to reach nooks and crannies. That story is detailed here, in a piece by a promising young(ish) writer. Under Mark Warner and then Tim Kaine, Virginia went to great lengths to work alongside telecom interests in solving the broadband rollout conundrum, making the math work by doing things like using the state's credit rating to get cheap money to providers to do buildout work, or lending state assets like water towers to lower the capital investment needed to get the ball rolling in underserved areas of the state. It's a somewhat conciliatory approach to providers that might rankle with broadband advocates, but it's probably fair to call it perfectly Obaman. And it's probably safe to expect Chopra to keep a sharp focus on the end result of getting fiber in the ground or wireless in the sky.

The White House is celebrating hitting the 100 day mark by posting a few hundred photos to its Flickr stream, and they offer a peek into what's happening in the Obama White House on a day-to-day basis. It's probably fair to say that, like him or not, there's something humanizing about seeing the president -- and all the president's men and women -- going about the work of the nation and catching the occasional football game in 3D. That, of course, is likely the White House's intention, and it's one of the prime benefits of social media for government actors: we're more reluctant to see people as proper targets of ire and derision when we regularly see them cavorting with puppies, or otherwise acting in ways that are identifiably human.

White House photographer Pete Souza mixes straightforward fare with some rather artistic captures:

This is probably as good a time as any to note that the General Services Administration -- the mechanics of the executive branch, if you will -- has been busy negotiating government-wide terms-of-service arrangements with web services so that every agency and department can post their very own Flickr photosets, YouTube videos, and the like. Having pre-approved services streamlines things when executive branch entities get ready to get 2.0. Get ready for videos of Tom Vilsack hoeing a row or shots of Stephen Chu working out energy-saving algorithms in his DOE office late at night. GSA's latest round of negotiations covers Facebook, MySpace, Blist, AddThis, Vimeo, and Slideshare.

This may be a bit in the weeds even for me, but hear me out. Is Aneesh Chopra the CTO we were promised by candidate Obama? Not Chopra, exactly, but the position of Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America he's been appointed to. Are the terms of service that have been laid out for Chopra's role in the executive office of the president ultimately consistent with what Obama pledged to institute during his run for the presidency? One Virginia Democrat is making the case that nope, it's not. And he wants to fix it.

Candidate Obama spoke about "the nation's first Chief Technology Officer" who would work to "ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices." We get into a small pit of trouble right at the start. Chopra has actually been appointed to the role of Associate Director of Technology in the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, an advisory position that's been around for a while. That said, Chopra was also made, it seems, an assistant to the president, which could check the "first CTO" box.

But NextGov's Aliya Sternstein is reporting that Rep. Gerald Connolly is still backing a bill (H.R. 1910) that would, he argues, actually enshrine into statute the CTO position in a way that reflects the job Obama laid out during the campaign. Connolly, it seems, is making that case that we're playing small ball with the way the CTO position is currently laid out. His bill lays out the specific duties and obligations that a true U.S. CTO should carry. They're many, so I'd encourage you to read through them. But, in sum, this would be a CTO with considerable powers, a CTO with the strength of 10 presidential appointees! Chopra could hold hearings, hand out grants, and deputize volunteers as government employees -- which might be a end run around the continued messiness over whether technologists can actually do part-time service for their government under the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

What does it all matter? It might not. But passing H.R. 1910 could create the opening that Chopra is going to need if he's to accomplish the tall stack of goals that President Obama has set in front of him.

Give the White House credit for knowing exactly the sort of snark many folks are prepared to heap upon them for joining Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. What exactly, some will no doubt ask, is the President of the United States doing poking and tweeting and [insert whatever it is you do on MySpace]? Doesn't he have better things to do? The White House had an answer prepared right from the start: President Obama's not messing around on the Internets in some ill-considered attempt to look super with-it. He's tweeting to stop the spread of a global pandemic. Okay with you?

The White House new media team has a powerful spokesperson for their efforts: Obama himself. In this weekend's video address, he briefly makes the presidential case for the power of social media in the context of halting the spread of swine flu/H1N1 (at about the 1:40 mark):

We have asked every American to take the same steps you would take to prevent any other flu: keep your hands washed; cover your mouth when you cough; stay home from work if you're sick; and keep your children home from school if they're sick. And the White House has launched pages in Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to support the ongoing efforts by the CDC to update the public as quickly and effectively as possible.

Somewhat relatedly, here's a sign that the White House is aware of at least some of our Internet traditions, including the Twitter custom of taking Friday's to recommend people for others to follow. A tweet from @whitehouse yesterday:

#followfriday Official info on H1N1: @CDCemergency @CDC_eHealth @whonews @BirdFluGov @dhsjournal @usedgov Thanks for the positive feedback!

The question is, will @BirdFluGov follow @whitehouse back? Stay tuned.