MoveOn.org, the five-million member e-organization of progressive activists, is doing something really interesting with its members tonight: thousands of them are going to be participating in a live online dial-test of President Obama's State of the Union speech. The organization sent out an email earlier this evening to its list, asking people if they want to rate the speech live.

One big question this morning: will the President tell people to head to YouTube during his first State of the Union address?

The White House announced on the White House blog this morning that Obama's SOTU on Wednesday night will have an added dash of citizen participation, one that harkens back to the early days of the Obama administration and its experimentation with projects like its Open for Questions forum, where thumbs-up-thumbs-down technology bubbled up questions for administration officials, and an online town hall. More recently and away from home, the provocative and news generating "Great Firewall" question during Obama's town hall in Shanghai with young Chinese people in November came in through an Internet-based ask for questions.

But during Obama's first year, though, the "participation" part of the open government initiative he announced in his first full day in office has taken a back seat to work the Obama administration has done advancing efforts to increase the transparency of the presidency.

David Plouffe is out with an email to Organizing for America's massive list, calling on Obama supporters to "regroup, refocus, and re-engage on the vital work ahead." The focal point of his missive: to attend State of the Union "watch parties" organized by OFA members around the country.

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...

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.