Welcome to the White House (.gov)
To match the inauguration of Barack Obama, whitehouse.gov is completely new and revamped. Design wise, it is exceptionally nice, following the same overall look and feel of Obama’s campaign materials. There are a couple of interesting things from my five minute looking over the site. For the first time, the White House now has its own official blog, with RSS feed and the ability to sign up for an email list (Though it seems to be broken at the moment). This is the sort of thing I have felt all government organizations have needed for awhile. We have very simple and established technology for allowing people to easily get information without having to look for it.
I personally think there should be an RSS feed of all legislation that comes before Congress. I would like to be able to follow what is happening, but as things are now, it is extremely hard to get to that information. Along those lines, one of the initial white house blog posts states that for all non-emergency legislation, the full text will be posted to whitehouse.gov for 5 days before Obama will sign it into law. During that time, the public will be allowed to review and comment.
Here’s to the government moving in the direction of transparency and accountability.