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The US Government's Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, called today for a radical new approach to government information technology, focusing on utilization of consumer-type Web 2.0 tools that can "tap into the vast amounts of knowledge...in communities across the country."

"We've got to recognize that we can't treat the American people as subjects but as a co-creator of ideas," Kundra was quoted as saying by Government Computer News writer Wyatt Kash today. "We need to tap into the vast amounts of knowledge...in communities across the country. The federal government doesn't have a monopoly on the best ideas." That's exciting, if it's more than just words.

Sometimes, all you need is a MySpace profile and a dream. And a shopping cart.

For casual Internet users who are all over the social web but don't have the knowledge, resources, or desire to set up and market full online storefronts, there's PutACart, which democratizes the long tail of e-commerce, allowing users to peddle their wares from a plethora of the most popular social destinations online.

Microsoft's ambitious new search engine Bing went live to the public this weekend and there are already two useful Greasemonkey scripts that Firefox users can add to make the service much more useful. Adding these overlays onto Bing will take you less than two minutes and you'll probably enjoy them a lot.

The first is much like our favorite Google script, which adds Twitter search results to the top of Google search results pages. Pennsylvania software developer, Billy DiStefano, published Twitter Search Results on Bing 30 minutes ago. Mattie Casper, a Principal Design Engineer at Citrix Systems, published a script called Bing Cleaner earlier this morning. Here's what Bing looks like with these scripts running, and short instructions on installing them.

According to a report from eMarketer, based on data from Brightkite, and market research agency Gfk NOP, iPhone users are able to recall ads they've seen on their mobile phone better than users for other mobile devices. Across the spectrum of mobile applications, ranging from surfing the web to playing games and listening to internet-based radio, about 59% of iPhone users recalled ads, while only 38% of non-iPhone users were able to recall ads they had seen on their phones.

According to a report in the New York Times this morning, Google is getting ready to enter the eBook market by providing publishers with an infrastructure for direct-to-consumer sales. The Times reports that Google discussed this initiative with publishers at last weekend's BookExpo in New York. According to the times, Google is mostly interested in creating an architecture that would enable publishers to do direct-to-consumer sales (with the checkout handled by Google Checkout, we assume). But there is also no reason to believe that this initiative could not include some kind of electronic store, maybe on top of Google's controversial Google Books service.

Now that Microsoft's new search engine Bing has gone live an unexpected two days early, many of us are rushing out to test it for the very first time. Although Microsoft employees had access to Bing internally back when it was code-named "Kumo," today is the first day that the world actually gets their hands on the new service.

When testing a search engine, a lot of people try to think up queries to run in order to see how good the search results are. But in reality, the best way to really put a search engine through its paces is to switch your default search provider in your browser...well, at least temporarily! That way, you can test the new engine in real world scenarios without having to remind yourself to head over to a new URL.

Microsoft's new search engine Bing unexpectedly went live tonight, including a re-direct from http://www.live.com - previously Microsoft's 'personalized start page' destination. So search has usurped a Netvibes-like start page as Microsoft's default homepage for its web services.

In last week's launch announcement, Bing was being bandied about as Microsoft's latest attempt to steal market share away from Google. In particular, according to Microsoft, Bing will focus on four verticals: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, and finding a local business. We took the new search engine for a test run tonight.

Today we're debuting two new writers on ReadWriteWeb. Steven Walling is our new writer for the Enterprise channel, while Dana Oshiro takes the reigns of ReadWriteStart. Both of these fantastic new hires will be focused on our channels. Steven becomes lead writer for the still nascent ReadWriteEnterprise, which unfortunately had a false start a month and a half ago. You can expect to see a few posts a day from Steven; also we'll be introducing a re-design of RWEnterprise soon. Dana becomes lead writer for ReadWriteStart, our channel devoted to early stage startups. She will post once or twice a day there.

You will see both of these writers on the main ReadWriteWeb homepage, as at this stage we're streaming everything through there.