In the opening remarks to his press conference yesterday, President Barack Obama adopted a stronger tone against the violence and repression in Iran than he had previously, saying "suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away." Fair enough. But can translating them give them legs? After the event, a notable Farsi-language tweet popped up in the White House's Twitter stream. Google Translate's new Farsi-to-English option gives a rough translation as "President Obama's remarks in his press conference about Iran with Persian." The Washington Post's Scott Wilson has the details on the Obama White House's multilingual outreach, including a note from the White House that intention behind the translation is so that "the Iranian people could read it in their own language."

But if the Obama White House now speaks Farsi, it also seems fairly fluent in Twitter. Worth noting is how the White House adopted the #iranelection hashtag -- a signal that they see themselves as part of an ongoing, global conversation.

Back in my day, if you had a bright idea, you planted a flag for it by registering a domain name. But that time has passed, my friends. These days, even more important than a website seems to be picking a humble Twitter hashtag to define a political meme. Then you throw it out into the world and seeing if it has any stickiness. Good ones can evolve out of Twitter to the rest of the web and world, portable from Twitter to RSS streams to, yes, domain names to blog post tags. Hashtags are kinda like OpenID for ideas.

Now's a good time to ask, what the heck happened with the defeat of the bailout bill on Capitol Hill on Monday?; Debate? What debate? Oh, there's a debate tonight. The Internet has bubbled up some ways to play along with Palin vs. Biden; Wow. The Obama campaign has released a gorgeous new iPhone app; Congress has okayed a bill that requires the government to regularly and accurately assess who in the U.S. has broadband access and who doesn't. If we may humbly advance an opinion: excellent!; and a good deal more. Honest.