Today's announcement of the formation of the Obama-Biden Transition Project, covered in detail here by DemConWatchBlog, left me wondering about two things.
1. If the transition senior staff includes a communications director (Dan Pfeiffer, who was communications director in the campaign), why doesn't it include an internet or new media director?
2. What kinds of interactive components will the transition website include? The announcement included a note saying that "the official website for the transition is www.change.gov and it will be live later today," but so far that site isn't live, at least not for me.

One thing I think we do know: it looks like Blue State Digital, the same powerhouse Democratic internet firm that handled Obama's online needs during the campaign, is building the www.change.gov site. Earlier today I took this screenshot of test.change.gov:

It looks like this url is now password protected.

After taking a quick initial look at Change.gov, the Obama transition team's new site, we concluded that while it echoes the campaign's talk of open government, the site doesn't have much meat on its bones yet. The Next Right's Jonathan Klingler suggests that the fact that the site has "plenty of feedback forms but not much more" points to the "contradiction of the postmodern left netroots." Let's take a deep breath here; But members of Team Obama aren't the only ones who have been busy. Familiar online conservatives Patrick Ruffini, Erick Erickson, Mindy Finn, Michael Turk; Justin Sayfie, former spokesman for Gov. Jeb Bush; and others have launched RebuildTheParty.com; Some in the online left aren't pleased with the decisions President-elect Obama has made or is rumored to possibly be making; and a good deal more.

As Nancy noted on Thursday, President-elect Obama's transition website, Change.gov, "echoes [the] campaign pledge of open government." But as of last night, the entire "Agenda" section has been removed from Change.gov, replaced by three broad sentences about what Obama hopes to do. Where did it go?

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.

There have been a number of good critiques of President-elect Obama's one-way use of YouTube to broadcast his weekly radio address (see especially my colleague Ellen Miller and John Dickerson's takes) and so I'm not going to repeat them here. By posting the address on YouTube--even without comments or ratings allowed--Obama is allowing us to see something that we couldn't see before when presidential addresses were just on radio: who cares to listen and who cares to link.

In the beginning, the blog on Change.gov looked like entirely neutered version of what passes for a blog looks in the rest of the world. Soulless early posts like "President-Elect Obama...Calls for 'Swift Action' on the Economy" left me wondering if we'd just witnessed the birth of yet another press-release blog. And while Change.gov's blog posts are still penned by some unnamed staffer and there's no way to drop a comment either on the posts themselves or any of the videos on the site, some of the more recent posts raise hopes that Team Obama gets that the Internet has value as an almost-instantaneous feedback loop between the man in the Oval Office and the people he's elected to serve (especially after he's forced to power-down his beloved Blackberry).

Covered: Online Right Sees a Chance to Take Root; While the Online Left Considers the President Elect; The Agenda Returns, Somewhat Tamed; Inside a Team Meeting; From World of Warcraft to Washington; Jobs in Internet Defense; and a good deal more.

The efforts to engage citizens in the Obama administration since Election Day have bounced from increasing volunteerism to throwing random ideas against a wall and hoping one sticks. We need to get focused and constructive before we look up and it's April and all we have are millions of frustrated people who are feeling left out. This election was about transforming government, that's the real change that we need.

President-elect Barack Obama is out with the second of his weekly bite-sized video messages to the American public, billed as "Your Weekly Address" and posted on both Change.gov and YouTube. (Though there's no Google monopoly at work here. Obama's video addresses are posted not only on the search giant's video site but on MSN Video and Yahoo! Video as well -- though you do have to squint a bit to see the links to the non-YouTube postings.)

In this week's four-minute spot, Obama talks with urgency about the economic situation facing the country, saying that struggling Americans "need help, and they need it now." The President-elect details the serious need for an economic recovery plan, and talks about directing his economic team to craft an ambitious plan that will create 2.5 million jobs by the start of 2011.

Obama's in a tough spot, though. He's eager to demonstrate that he gets that the U.S. is in dire straits. But as President-elect, he doesn't have a tremendous amount of official power. He's pledged to do this weekly YouTube address until January 20th, which, by my count, means eight more times he'll go before us to provide his insight into a government he's not yet helming.

Building a Better Bully Pulpit; We the People 2.0; We Have the Tools to Finally Pop the White House Bubble; Government is Cool Again; Japan's Online Politics (or Lack Thereof); Ideas for Change, and a Road Map; and a good deal more.