The Hill Reports that there is yet another service tracking government tweets:

• New site tracks government-run Twitter accounts. By Jordan Fabian The Hill (01/04/10).

The site is GovLive, which aggregates "all government news releases in one place" and aims to "be the first comprehensive search engine for finding local government news in real-time." Its tweets page gives a real-time "bird's-eye view of official government Twitter feeds across the US" and allows you to filter by State or County!

The Hill says GovLive tracks 68,031 tweets from 540 agencies.

Other services that are tracking government tweets include:

• a list of Twitter accounts from Cabinet Secretaries, Agencies and Departments by The White House
• GovTwit
• Tweet Congress
• Congressional 140
• GovFresh
• Members of Congress who Twitter
• Capitol Tweets

According to the White House Blog (Making A List, Checking It Twice, by Katie Stanton, November 23, 2009):

Today we’re launching a list on the official White House account on Twitter which will make it easier for people to follow U.S. Government Twitter feeds. We’ve included a variety of accounts from Cabinet Secretaries, Agencies and Departments.

The list address is http://twitter.com/whitehouse/usg.

Libraries, Journalism, and Publishing share some common issues and face many common challenges in the digital age. It seems particularly appropriate that, as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) holds a workshop on the future of journalism, it is using digital tools to reach more people.

The FTC will hold workshops in Washington, DC on December 1 and 2, 2009, to explore how the Internet has affected journalism. The event is free and open to the public. The workshop will assemble representatives from print, online, broadcast and cable news organizations, academics, consumer advocates, bloggers, and other new media representatives.

• How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?

You can submit questions using the Twitter tag #ftcnews.

Comments can be filed online at https://public.commentworks.com/ftc/newsmediaworkshop. See submitted comments here.

A live webcast will be available on the day of the event. Bookmark this page and come back on December 1st and 2nd to link to the webcast.

Updates regarding workshops, including an agenda and panelists will be posted on this webpage, or can be accessed via RSS Feed.

Social Networking and Constituent Communication: Member Use of Twitter During a Two-Week Period in the 111th Congress, by Matthew Eric Glassman, Jacob R. Straus, and Colleen J. Shogan, Congressional Research Service 7-5700, R40823 (September 21, 2009). [posted on politico.com]

See also:

• For GOP, revenge is tweet, by KENNETH P. VOGEL Politico (9/23/09)
• Tweet All About It: New Stats On Hill Usage, By Andrew Noyes, Congress Daily "Tech Daily Dose" (Sept. 23, 2009).

An article in Scholarly Kitchen does a good job of comparing and contrasting Twitter and Facebook and addressing the utility of Twitter for scholarly communication. As the article says, "...a network that is open and content-centric has advantages. This is particularly true, for example, for scholarly and scientific communications." I think there is a parallel here for government information providers.

• The Strength of Weak Ties: Why Twitter Matters in Scholarly Communication, by Michael Clarke, Society for Scholarly Publishing, Scholarly Kitchen. (Aug 12, 2009).

NextGov says they goofed in reporting that Marines banned Twitter:

Marines and Social Nets: We Goofed, By Bob Brewin, NextGov, (08/07/09)

...the AP misconstrued the meaning of the Marine administrative instruction issued on Aug 3, which reinforced a longstanding directive released by the Defense Information Systems Agency in 2007 banning access to social Web sites on Defense networks to conserve bandwidth for operational requirements.

The instruction issued on Monday, he said, actually made it easier for Marines whose jobs require access to social nets to get waivers to use Defense nets to connect with Twitter, YouTube etc.

UPDATE: NextGov says this and similar reports were in error and the Marines did NOT ban Twitter. See: Marines did NOT ban Twitter!

Marines Ban Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, by Noah Shachtman, Wired Danger Room (August 3, 2009).

The article also reports that, "The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has 4,000 followers on Twitter. The Department of Defense is getting ready to unveil a new home page, packed with social media tools. The Army recently ordered all U.S. bases to provide access to Facebook. Top generals now blog from the battlefield."

Neil Williams, head of corporate digital channels at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, in the UK Cabinet Office, has published a 20 page guide to using Twitter that aims to describe "why and how we intend to establish and manage a corporate presence on the microblogging social network Twitter.com."

• Template Twitter strategy for Government Departments

Also see Williams announcement: Template Twitter strategy for Government Departments, by Neil Williams Digital Engagement Blog (21. July 2009), and a comment on The Reg: Gov geek publishes 5000-word Twitter guide, by Joe Fay, The Register, (28th July 2009).

The Library of Congress announced via their Twitter account, that:

LOC will capture tweets on #sotomayor for its web archives on the Sotomayor nomination. http://www.loc.gov/webcapture/

Here is a list of some of the latest web capture projects they are working on:

Supreme Court Nominations 2009

The Supreme Court Nominations 2009 Web Archive will be a selective collection of Web sites archived between June 2009 through the completion of the hearings process. Web sites collected will include materials produced by watchdog, public policy, and political advocacy groups, blogs and tweets, community and religious organizations, foreign and domestic news sources, educational and research institutions, and independent websites.
Collection dates: June 2009 through confirmation hearings.

Indian General Elections

The Library's Delhi Overseas Operations Office is documenting the ongoing process of India general election in 2009.

Presidential Transition During a Time of Crises Web Archive

Presidential Transition During a Time of Crises Web Archive will be a selective collection of Web sites archived between January 2009 and June 2009. Web sites collected will include materials produced by domestic and foreign political groups, community and religious organizations, advocacy groups, foreign and domestic news sources, and independent websites.
Collection dates: January 2009 - June 2009. The collection will be evaluated prior to completion and may be extended.

I would suggest they start archiving the tweets about the #iranelection (see earlier blog post) by James R. Jacobs.

Twitter, the 140 character social media micro-blog, was scheduled to go down for maintenance on monday night. But, according to the CNN blog, a little thing called the Iranian elections and a request from the US State Department caused them to change their scheduled downtime to yesterday afternoon from 2-3 PST (middle of the night Tehran time) in order to ensure that the flow of information from Iran remains open and that Iranians can continue to communicate internally and with the rest of the world. This is a pretty amazing development in that, despite the Iranian restrictions on journalists and news organizations, the world is still able to get up to the minute accounts - complete with video on youtube, hashtags on twitter and facebook. Now libraries just have to figure out how to collect, preserve and organize this massive flow of information ;-)

Mashable has more on why this matters as well as a HOWTO guide on following the elections.

Air Force Calls In Twitter Air Strike, by Mitch Wagner, Information Week, May 22, 2009.

I thought the use of Twitter was a gimmick, but now it's starting to look like a real communications channel. It's tough to get a nuanced idea across in a 140-character message, but the service's ubiquity and ease of use makes up for its other shortcomings. It's easy to use Twitter to send a message, and easy for people to find that message.

Social media allows government to take its message directly to the people, bypassing journalists.

This may sound odd at first, but give it a try:

• TwHistory

Welcome to TwHistory. We believe that history is filled with exciting stories. We also believe that these stories can be told through Twitter; through the people who lived and experienced them. We go through journals, diaries, letters, and other original sources to deliver the day-to-day lives of people who lived through some of histories most exciting times. We broadcast this information through Twitter, and feel this is a new and exciting approach to understanding history. Instead of reading about a month-long campaign in a few hours, you experience it over the course of a month, in small, 140 character ‘Tweets’.

First up: Battle of Gettysburg with Tweets by President Lincoln and many others.

@ Gen_hooker: We have news here that the enemy has reoccupied heights above Fredericksburg. Is that so?

A tip of the hat to Kate!

This web site, TweetCongress, makes it easy to find your U.S. Senators and Representative, see if they tweet, and follow them and tweet them.

About TweetCongress.org

We believe transparent government is better government. Twitter enables real conversation between lawmakers and voters, in real time. Find your representatives in Congress, follow them and give them a tweet full!

Thanks to Sunlight Labs!

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) now has three accounts on Twitter:

• SEC Investor Ed
• SEC News
• SEC Jobs

According to The UK Telegraph, "The three feeds focus on investor education, general news, and job opportunities" and "SEC_Investor_Ed is little more than a rolling feed from its own newssite which details the enforcement actions."

There seems to be a lot of overlap between "Investor Ed" and "News" in the few items I have scanned. Perhaps time will make it more apparent the differences between the feeds.

On 02.24.2009, FGI "wholeheartedly and without reservation" endorsed the YES WE SCAN campaign of Carl Malamud for Public Printer of the United States. Mother Jones unequivocally endorsed Malamud one week later: "President Obama, Appoint Carl Malamud!" (Jonathan Stein | Mon March 2, 2009):

"Carl Malamud is a badass. If you are a techie or a transparency geek, you probably already know who he is. If you've never heard of him, he is an internet pioneer who has worked for decades, at times using renegade means, to make government information public. He fought to make the information in the SEC's "EDGAR" database free and public (which it now is) and is currently leading a similar fight over the court records database PACER. Today, Malamud has another campaign. He wants to become the Public Printer of the United States, i.e. the head of the Government Printing Office (GPO)..."

The Lede Blog, NYTimes.com, looks at Malamud's campaign in "Yes He Scan" (03.04.2009): "To show that he’s the people’s choice, Mr. Malamud is asking for support in the form of links to his site. So far he says he’s got more than 700 endorsements, like these tweets, and this blog post by Lawrence Lessig, which says, in part:

'I can’t imagine a more exciting appointment. Sometimes an agency needs STASIS. Sometimes it needs CHANGE. Gov’t tech is certainly in the second category, and no one I know of could more effectively deliver on the commitment to open government than he.'" [Lessig Blog | 02.27.2009]