GovTwit Week in Review: 7/26 – 8/01

Interesting Gov 2.0 tweets and stories from July 26 – August 1st, 2009

The week got off to a fun start when an alleged White House employee dubbing themselves the “realtweetthroat” contacted @GovFresh to blow the lid off of Twittergate, poking fun at the fact that the microblogging service was reported to be blocked at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The White House tried to clear the record to show that tweets were in fact coming live from the world’s most famous address, but downplaying that Twitter is in fact blocked for all but the select few on the President’s new media team.

Over at GovLoop, Andy Krzmarzick rounded up a posse of helpful Goveratti to cull and edit a “TweetBook” based on tweets that came out of the previous week’s Open Government & Innovations Conference (tagged with #OGI). The book should be ready the first week of August

In the U.K., Neil Williams (@NeillyNeil) with the Dept. for Business, Innovation and Skills, pushed out a 20-page Twitter guidebook for government that snowballed into quite a good bit of media coverage on both sides of the pond, including stories at Mashable, the New York Times, AP and the BBC. Some of the headlines and leads poked fun at the length of the guide when talking about a service limited to 140 characters per message, but overall the piece was recieved well by govies and social media evangelists alike (though InformationWeek’s Mitch Wagner had some qualms). It should be noted that both USA.gov and HHS both published similar (but shorter) primers in July as well.

The Smithsonian also published its Web/New Media Strategy, there was some coverage of the growth of Gov using Twitter in Government Technology (based on GovTwit data), and eWeek provided 10 tips to make Twitter more useful for government.

It was also interesting to see that the Dept. of Interior’s National Business Center put its Cloud Computing strategy online.

Capping off the week, FCW reported that the U.S. DoD is considering banning many social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, and the DoD kicked off a “Web 2.0 Guidance Forum” to crowdsource input on any decision.

Interesting Additions to GovTwit Directory Tweeted This Week:

Added CA Congresswoman @lynnwoolsey

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) is tweeting! @NIAIDNews

The IRS recently joined Twitter @InternalRevenue

The Senator ran for Prez, yet barely cracks 1,000 followers? Only 23 tweets; gotcha – Added @johnkerry

Added @HKGCIO, Hong Kong’s CIO Jeremy Godfrey (first China/HK ID in directory)

Added Iraqi Deputy PM @BarhamSalih (1st Iraq Gov official in Dir)

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