Higher Education by day, MLIS student by night

Government agencies on Twitter: a few comprehensive sites

Sunday, January 18th, 2009

obamafacebook1Updated 6/30/09

It has been widely noted how Barack Obama has utilized technology and social media to educate and inform U.S. citizens about his campaign (just check out his YouTube channel and his Facebook, Twitter, MySpace pages).  In fact, some debate whether it made a difference in helping him win the election. Now he has a new site, change.gov which has the mission to inform the public of what’s going on as he prepares to take office this Tuesday, January 20th.

It looks like more government agencies are following Obama’s lead.

Government on Twitter – a few comprehensive sites with info:

Update 1/22: Check out Tweet Congress. Includes statistics (e.g., see who’s the most followed, who tweets/who doesn’t, who tweets the most, etc.) and a nice search function to see which Congress-folk are using Twitter:  search by name, state, party. If your favorite Congressperson isn’t on there, it has an option to sign a petition in attempt to get them tweeting!

It is interesting to see the government utilizing social media in order to inform the public. It makes total sense, but it is amazing nonetheless!

Update 6/30/09: I discovered a new site called GovFresh that incorporates ALL live U.S. Government feeds ALL in one place: Twitter, YouTube, RSS, Facebook, Flickr accounts and more. They have it all: feeds from each branch in government, different agencies, departments, state governments, the military, contractors, political parties, news and so on…

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