Go read British Cabinet Officer Tom Watson's speech on the "Power of information" and imagine a Member of Congress making a similar speech on how technology can radically reinvent government. Imagine one of our presidential candidates making it (even Barack Obama, who has done the most thinking on this topic.) You can't. But maybe, if we pay more attention to our cousins across the pond, soon someone will.

Five years ago, Watson was one of the first MPs to blog, and notes that even though it opened him up to daily abuse, "the blog broke down the walls between legislators and electors in a way that interested me. So I persevered." Now he says, "I believe in the power of mass collaboration.... I believe that the old hierarchies in which government policy is made are going to change for ever."

I'm at the Politics Web 2.0 conference at the University of London, Royal Hollaway, and things have just kicked off. As always with my visits to conferences, I will try to blog that which I find interesting (I'm no Ethan Zuckerman) and all my renderings are not verbatim, but rough paraphrasing. Here are my notes on one of the first keynotes, which definitely held my attention. Helen Margetts, of the Oxford Internet Institute, is presenting on "Digital-era Governance: Peer production, Co-creation and the Future of Government." This is one area where the possible impact of the internet has been underestimated, especially within the community, she starts off. These technologies could have a huge meaning for government.

Time for some editorial housekeeping. In our never-ending quest to cover how technology is changing politics and serve the growing community of activists, technologists, journalists, politicians, government workers, bloggers and plain old citizens who are engaged in making this change happen, we are pleased to announce two new additions to our editorial crew. Dave Witzel and Allison Fine are coming on board Personal Democracy Forum as senior editors who will help expand our coverage on PersonalDemocracy.com of how mass, networked participation in the public arena is affecting all the important arenas outside of electoral campaigns (which we cover obsessively at techPresident).

The next White House Web site should tell us a lot about whether Obama believes what he has said about bringing transparency and accountability to the government.

Letting Us in to the White House; Conventional Wisdom Turns Against CEOs as CTO; Busting Out of the "Finest Prison in the World;" Building the Post-Obama Movement; NASA's Filling CIO Position at the Speed of Light; How Did Times Readers Do in Their Cabinet Bets?; and a good deal more.

Dozens of senior web managers spanning federal agencies from USDA to HUD to NASA to EPA to ASDF (okay, we made that last one up) have penned a useful white paper with recommendations for the next presidential administration...This latest and last video installment of the life and times of Barney, the White House dog, is truly something to behold. The Bush family gathers to celebrate Christmas in this stilted and scripted piece, and you have to get a load of the President acting out some intentionally goofy lines, like when he admonishes his pet to quit "nappin' to the finish"...If you ever get the question from colleagues, allies, or clients, "We want to get all web 2.0 up in this piece. Hmm, where do we start?," then we've got something for you...and more.

At 12:01pm Eastern time, as promised, the whitehouse.gov domain flipped over and we received our first glimpse of what's to come over the next four years. Take a look!

• While it might not have been until a few minutes after noon that Barack Obama and John Roberts got that oath of office thing sorted out, the White House New Media team was ready to go on time...
• Footage of Sunday's "We Are One" concert at the Lincoln Memorial has been pulled down from YouTube, with shots of Pete Seeger and Challenger, the bald eagle who wouldn't fly, replaced by "this video is no longer available due to a copyright claim" notices...
• He's keeping the Blackberry, reports someone who ought to know...
• And more.

As the tech community poured over the new whitehouse.gov site, one of the first subterranean changes noted was that of a file most people would never notice called robots.txt. This file serves as a notice to search robots informing them of what files they should or shouldn't survey. Upon seeing the new version of the file, some noticed that it only had two lines of code excluding robot searches vs. the former whitehouse.gov robots.txt that had nearly 2400 lines of exclude lines by the end of the Bush administration, sparking excitement and controversy over what the change means in terms of government transparency.

• One of the two executive orders signed by Barack Obama in his first full day in office pledged to shift governing presumptions about secrecy in the executive branch. With the swipe of a pen, Obama hopes to do away with the federal government's knee-jerk compulsion to squirrel away information...
• New White House staffers find themselves time-traveled back about, oh, a decade when they walk through 1600 Pennsylvania's gates...
• The latest in the on-going "will he or won't he" saga involving Obama's beloved Blackberry...
• And more.