Phoebe Connelly explains how federal agencies learned to stop worrying and love Web 2.0:
Barack Obama, widely heralded as the first “Internet president,” is inseparable from his BlackBerry and delivers a weekly address on YouTube. The White House has its own Flickr stream. Senators now duke it out via Twitter. (The Supreme Court, or at least its Web site, seems firmly moored in the late 1990s.)
But in government agencies, where civil servants and agendas are correctly outside the influence of whoever resides in the White House, the online revolution is moving a bit more slowly. On a rainy fall day, some 100 agency workers gathered under sparkling chandeliers in the ballroom of Washington, D.C.’s Willard Hotel for a day-long seminar on the finer points of using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even virtual worlds such as Second Life.
