The Next Right's Patrick Ruffini is warning conservative allies about the coming press-pocalypse. Using Bobby Jindal as a model, Ruffini traces attempts to "delegitimize and destroy up-and-coming Republicans" as they resonated through Daily Kos to Keith Olbermann to Talking Points Memo to Politico to the general political consciousness. Oh, he's not upset about it. He wants it. Conservative commentators need to get off their lazy behinds, says Ruffini, and start reporting. His commenters aren't so sure. Some argue that stories about Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers were just too fluffy to get traction. Others make the point that GOP leadership is too weak to do the aggressive oppo pushing that a party in opposition needs to do to earn its version of events an airing. Writes commentator "Cahnman": "Here's a much simpler solution: Don't nominate John McCain ever again."

On the first full day of his presidency, Barack Obama issued an executive memo calling on the government to become more transparent, participatory and collaborative. He wrote:

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Of course, public participation is a two-way street. That's why, today, Personal Democracy Forum is proud to announce that we are partnering with a cross-partisan coalition of old and new media in launching "Ask the President," an open, collaborative, participatory forum where anyone can post a question and vote up their favorites. Our lead partners, The Nation magazine and The Washington Times, have committed to send a credentialed journalist to every presidential press conference armed with a list of the top citizen-driven questions, aiming to ask the President at least one generated by the public.

• Melissa Jenna Compagnucci (didn't we see her in one of the YouTube debates?) posts a YouTube video plugging "Ask the President."
• The Washington Times on its support for "Ask the President."
• EchoDitto's Michael Silberman digs deep into the Obama tech operation and how it moved online enthusiasm into on-the-ground activism. The secret? Data, data, data.
• The Obama team is recruiting new media directors for various government agencies. Details here.
• Recovery.gov is spawning a web of sites and structured data at a fast pace, writes Greg Elin.

Nearly two years ago, I helped pen a posting here, suggesting that politicians should embrace a new town hall format. The idea was that the Internet and user-ranked questions would help leverage a community's voice and provide real insight into the minds of constituents. Not only that, the Internet promised to grow the size of the town hall, putting more people "in the room" than ever before. This morning I watched the President's Internet Town Hall, comprised primarily of user-ranked questions, and I'm glad to see how far we've come. In fact, yesterday the General Services Administration announced agreements allowing the use of Flickr, YouTube, and Blip.tv by federal agencies, a large step in the right direction towrds meeting people where they're at on the Internet. However, these are only the first steps.

The Huffington Post's Nico Pitney's question to President Obama at yesterday's White House press conference has caused quite the stir in certain circles. Well, not so much the question itself -- which asked whether an acceptance of the re-election of Ahmadinejad would constitute a "betrayal" of Iranian demonstrators -- but how the question got to the point of being asked at all. That there was some measure of orchestration behind the exchange was undeniable; Obama called on Pitney by saying "I know that there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet. Do you have a question?" And Pitney later described how he solicited questions through readers of his live blog, and through outreach in Farsi on Twitter and the Persian social network Balatarin; the White House saw what he was up to, and got in touch to let him know that he might be called on during the briefing.

It was all too much for some. Politico's Michael Calderone declared that Obama "broke with protocol" by calling on Pitney in between questions from the wire services. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank dispensed with nuance, calling Pitney "a planted questioner." Huffington Post namesake Arianna Huffington pushed back, saying that critics of the exchange "clearly need a nap," and pointing to her own criticisms of the Obama Administration to stand as a proxy for HuffPo's objectivity. White House spokesperson Bill Burton focused on the concept that Pitney's question wasn't his at all, really, but a query channeled through him. "[I]t was an innovative way to get a question directly form an Iranian," said Burton, before getting in a dig at the regular White House press corps: "[H]e ended up asking the toughest question that the President took on Iran."

Our own Ari Melber, writing for The Nation, makes the case that -- leaving aside the desirability of injecting some "regular citizen" perspective into the press process -- White House press conferences aren't exactly a free-wheeling exchange of ideas on any day.

The Financial Times profiles BigGovernment.com's Andrew Breitbart, with a particular focus on where he sees his place in the political news universe:

Clark Hoyt, the [New York Times'] public editor, wrote that it"stood still" after the damning [ACORN] videos were posted online. The newspaper"needs to be alert" to such stories"or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself", he wrote.

The Washington Post also was late to the story."One explanation may be that traditional news outlets like the Post simply don't pay sufficient attention to conservative media or viewpoints," wrote Andrew Alexander, its ombudsman.

Mr Breitbart says his distance from Beltway politics -- he works in the heart of liberal Los Angeles -- allows him to pursue his own agenda."I make no bones about coming from an ideological and partisan point of view. But at least I'm honest about it."

His network of websites includes BigHollywood, which aims to redress liberal bias in Hollywood and provide a forum for rightwing thinkers in the entertainment industry.

“I want to be the kingmaker," says Mr Breitbart."I want to find the best voices so that ideas and truth that have been suppressed for too long can find their way to a mass audience."

I'll have a recap later of today's modernizing government summit, but this caught my eye. When nothing's happen in the White House press room, at least, the monitor basically becomes a giant RSS reader for the White House blog.