Some people go to Washington to try to make the government more honest; others try to make it smaller. Technologist Tim O’Reilly is spending time in Washington, and bringing Washington officials to San Francisco, to do something different–perhaps something more realistic. O’Reilly is trying to help government become a platform for innovation.

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Techmeme is on fire this morning with discussion of Rafe Needleman’s CNet post about Twitter’s supposed plans to index the content of links shared over the microblogging service. Ex-Googler turned Twitter exec, Santosh Jayaram, said as much last night, as well as mentioning plans to rank search results by the reputation of the author.

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The White House is making unprecedented use of consumer web technologies but those technologies aren’t always well suited to fit the government’s needs. They aren’t always well suited to fit anyone’s needs–but maybe if Obama leans on them a little bit things will change.

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University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student Adam Wilson has successfully tested a “brain wave monitor” to the Twitter publishing interface, allowing him to compose a message merely by thinking and publish it to the arguably too-popular microblogging service.

Either the gates of Hell have begun to open or this is a grad student who really knows how to publicize his work by riding the bandwagon of popular culture. Both are probably true.

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During the “Launch Pad” session, five start-ups took a grilling from developers, journalists and venture capitalists, then faced a crowd vote at the Web 2.0 Expo’s version of “American Idol.”

As attendees texted their votes, moderator John Battelle, founder of Federated Media Publishing, jokingly asked: “Want to have a dance-off?”

None were necessary. The techies in attendance were starry-eyed for all things mobile, picking Nitobi’s PhoneGap, an open-source tool for building mobile apps, as the People’s Choice winner. Life-tracking site zeaLOG was a close second.

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Barack Obama was just sworn in as President of the U.S. and though he stumbled in repeating his oath, the speech that followed was delivered flawlessly and was widely praised around the Web. (Several readers have told us that it wasn’t Obama that stumbled, it was Justice Roberts.) There were quite a few concepts discussed that we suspect haven’t been a part of past inaugural speeches. What words were used most often? We ran the full text of the speech through tag cloud generator Wordle.net for one view of the event, and just for the sake of historical context we ran George W. Bush’s second inaugural speech through as well. Update: After one reader suggested it, we’ve also added word clouds from Bill Clinton’s second inaugural speech and Reagan’s first below. Second update: By reader request, we’ve added Lincoln’s first and second inaugural speeches as well.

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Days after a wave of phishing attacks fooled thousands of Twitter users, it appears that another security hole has been found by…someone. Obama’s account, unused since election day, sent out an affiliate link to a survey with a gas card prize, Fox News said that “Bill O’Reily is gay” (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and Britney Spears made a lewd post about her anatomy. Rick Sanchez, the Twitter-loving CNN anchor, says he’s “high on crack and might not be coming into work today.”

The Fox tweet was deleted an hour after it was posted, so the password may not have been changed. The Facebook account on Twitter just posted a link to porn, so it appears that the situation remains unresolved. Update: Twitter says it’s been resolved but that users should change their passwords! The Twitter blog has just posted an explanation of the breach.

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In its first major upgrade ever, Google Blogsearch just relaunched and looks radically different. Instead of the blank page look of Google.com, Blogsearch now looks like Google News (but uglier)–with the hottest topics from the blogosphere aggregated on the front page. Readers can drill down in 11 different categories, including technology, business, sports and entertainment. Google says you can use Blogsearch to see what the world is talking about.

The user interface isn’t nearly as nice as leading tech blog memetracker Techmeme, but the new Blogsearch has some major advantages.

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Blogging is a fast medium–that’s one of its advantages over traditional media. There are bloggers who specialize in reporting fast about breaking news on a wide variety of topics. Most of those bloggers use Google’s RSS publishing technology FeedBurner as a middleman to deliver their posts to subscribers and capture analytics.

If FeedBurner decides to take its sweet time in delivering the news, that’s bad for bloggers. Unfortunately, that’s what’s happening right now. We’ve been seeing delays of up to 20 minutes between posting to our site and our posts appearing in our FeedBurner feeds. That’s a pretty serious problem and we’re not alone in experiencing it.

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Yesterday’s flare-up about the Terms of Service for Google’s new browser Chrome, followed by the company’s rapid backtracking on the demands it was making of users, left many people wondering about Google ToS in general.

Is it OK for service providers to require that they be exempt from the copyright norm of no re-use without explicit permission? We don’t think it is.

Chrome’s original ToS made far-reaching claims to rights for promotional re-use and sharing with partner companies of any data sent through the Google browser. When users cried foul, the company apologized and said that this standard condition for all Google services wasn’t appropriate for a browser. It’s not uncommon for services online to make such demands–but we argue that there’s a better way for this to be done.

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Google’s breadth of services is truly awesome, and the amount of information the company touches concerning our lives and world can sometimes feel downright frightening. While almost no one takes the old phrase “Don’t Be Evil” seriously anymore–now that there are billions of dollars on the table and Chinese autocrats to satisfy–regular evaluations of Google’s ethical positions still seem advisable.

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In a surprise move just unveiled this morning, a handful of big players led by MySpace and Yahoo have announced that public profiles, photos, videos and friend networks will now be portable from one site to another. We’re immediately wondering why this was a partnership between a handful of big sites instead of a move to truly open the Web in general.

According to a first report on TechCrunch, the initiative will begin with user information from MySpace being made available to Yahoo, Twitter and eBay in the next few weeks. MySpace is reported to have said that they will seek ways for “mom and pop sites” to participate as well in the future.

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There are just a few hours left in what should be an international holiday–RSS Awareness Day. Thought up by the good folks at DailyBlogTips.com and unknown until this morning to even RSS forefather Dave Winer, RSS Awareness Day is a fantastic idea. May 1 is a lot of things already but what the heck, let’s pile another one on. We’d like to take a few minutes to reflect on the world-changing tool that RSS is, and consider how different our lives would be without it.

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The Associated Press reported yesterday that it was able to use an undisclosed method to access private photos on Facebook, including some from Paris Hilton at the Emmys and others from Facebook founding CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s vacation in November of 2005.

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In the early days of the Web, going online was heralded as a great way to connect with other people who have had experiences similar to your own. The Web was a place to get answers, advice and community no longer limited by the geographic location of the individuals you connected with.

While all of that remains true today, the ubiquity of the Internet, the ease of publishing and the rise of online advertising has lead to the emergence of new kinds of Web sites: productivity, how-to and advice/Q&A sites that broadcast, scale and monetize that kind of information.

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