The change anticipated for so long by so many came quickly, just after noon in Washington. After centuries of struggle and halting progress, the nation was finally able to welcome… its first White House new media director. He is Macon Phillips, formerly with Blue State Digital, and he is the first to post in a new White House blog, one of the features of the instantly remodeled presidential site, whitehouse.gov.

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There’s a fresh dust-up over news headline aggregation going on now in Massachusetts as yet another publisher, in a misguided effort to keep its content in a silo, tries to buck the very nature of the Web. GateHouse Media, which owns 125 local papers across the state, is suing the New York Times Co., parent of the Boston Globe, over the links to GateHouse stories from the Globe’s Web sites.

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Computer peripheral powerhouse Logitech is working to get some PR mileage out of a milestone event–since letting the first one scamper into the retail market in 1985, the company has now shipped one billion computer mice. Pretty impressive, even if all the economic recovery plan numbers have sapped “billion” of some of its impact. “It’s rare in human history that a billionth of anything has been shipped by one company,” Logitech’s general manager Rory Dooley told the BBC. “Look at any other industry and it has never happened.” OK, members of paper clip and toothpick industries, among others, might want to quibble, but we’ll let it slide.

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It will go down as a mere footnote in U.S. election history, but Barack Obama has become the first presidential candidate to buy billboard space in the virtual landscape of video games. Over the past 10 days or so, reports have filtered in from players of the driving game “Burnout: Paradise” who were caught by surprise by the candidate’s visage beaming down from a roadside ad reminding them that the polls are now open for early voting and directing them to VoteForChange.com. Turns out the signs are just part of a buy that involves nine Xbox 360 titles from Electronic Arts and take advantage of relatively new technology that allows advertisements to be dynamically inserted into Net-connected games.

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I have nothing but deep collegial empathy for the folks at the Bloomberg financial newswire after they accidentally let their pre-prepared Steve Jobs obituary slip momentarily onto the Web yesterday. The sophisticated publishing systems used in newsrooms today have many advantages, but they can also disrupt the old-fashioned, linear workflow with its series of checkpoints and enable more people along the line to accidentally and instantly publish a file before its time, leading to its equally instant dissemination across the Net. Add in the need for news organizations to stand ready with quick responses to scheduled, foreseeable or, in the case of obituaries, inevitable events, and you can expect to see A-matter leaking out on a semi-regular basis.

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After six months of testing, Google is letting the public start using Knol, its effort to build an authoritative reference out of user contributions. When it was announced late last year, Knol sounded like a cross between the anyone-can-edit give and take of Wikipedia and the individual contributions of expertise found on Squidoo, and that’s the way it’s shaping up.

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Here’s all you need to know about the current sad state of the venture capital business: For the first time in 30 years, a fiscal quarter ended Monday without a single initial public offering for a venture-backed firm. Not a one. The machinery that, at its best, nurtures innovative businesses into viability (and at its worst blows money on overhyped fads) has ground to a halt.

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The long-awaited Google Health site made its beta debut Monday as the search sovereign’s answer to bringing personal medical records out of the Dark Ages, and like all of Google’s projects, its value is directly linked to your level of trust.

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The fans of microblogging service Twitter, led by head cheerleader Robert Scoble, were all aflutter Monday with the sense that in speedily passing along word of this morning’s earthquake in China, they have participated in a news reporting revolution. Seems Scoble started getting and forwarding tweets from China even as the ground was still shaking, an entire minute or two before the USGS posted preliminary data on location and strength, and more minutes before the bulletins started moving on the news wires.

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When last we looked after the big 700 MHz spectrum auction wrapped up in March, Team Google was congratulating itself for successfully winning open-access requirements for the desirable “C Block” without actually having to spend billions of dollars, clearing a path for devices powered by its open Android platform even though Verizon Wireless won those airwaves. The search sovereign should have known it wasn’t going to be that easy.

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It could easily have gone differently. Fifteen years ago, the management of the CERN physics lab in Geneva could have decided that this World Wide Web thing that researcher Tim Berners-Lee was working on might have some proprietary value down the road and put it under lock, key and license. But they didn’t. Fifteen years ago today, they put it into the public domain and changed history. Of the many Web milestones we celebrate, that makes this one special.

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I hate to break this to you and risk damaging the relationship of trust and faith that you have with your cable company, but according to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, Comcast has not been totally forthright in describing its handling of bandwidth-sucking BitTorrent transfers of large media files. Ever since it was caught using surreptitious, hacker-like techniques to interrupt such activity, the cable giant has claimed that it was simply exercising sound network management practices to ensure decent service for all, and that the throttling was applied only in times of high network congestion. Tuesday, Martin told a Senate committee that his agency’s ongoing investigation indicated otherwise.

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The backlash is slowly building. The public disapproval is getting more vocal. Governments are starting to step in, imposing regulation and segregation. Soon the targeted demographic will be pushed out of public spaces, quarantined in restricted areas with others of their kind who insist on keeping up their disgusting habit. Freedoms taken for granted will be constrained. All this because of the outcry over second-hand conversation. We need only to look across the pond for fresh evidence that the tide is turning against those who hold their private phone calls in the middle of a crowd, especially a crowd confined on public transportation.

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This is just pitiful. As a taxpayer, and especially as a Silicon Valley taxpayer, it rankles me no end to see yet another government technology initiative botched up because the people in charge are out of their depth. Now it’s happened again, this time with the Census Bureau’s plans to bring its tallying tech at least into the 20th century, if not the 21st.

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