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As we saw last week with the blackouts associated with the Stop Online Piracy Act protests, the Internet has given common citizens of the United States an unprecedented ability to interact with the political process. This precedent is also evident in the social media battles being waged between candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination. Tonight President Barack Obama will take that participation to a deeper level with the most connected State Of The Union Address ever.

This morning a startup in Washington, D.C. launched its website. What's the news? The website is a .gov, not a .com, and the startup is a government agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 established the agency last year. Republican lawmakers have been highly critical of the powers given to the new consumer bureau, which they say could stifle growth in the financial industry. They're expected to hold hearings about its future in the coming months. But the CFPB's head, Elizabeth Warren, is wasting no time in getting her agency up and running. Today's launch marks the beginning of a countdown to when many elements of the new bureau go into action on July 21.

If you're a social media-savvy citizen, Uncle Sam wants you to help populate a brand new timeline of the most important moments in government social media use.

Earlier today, David McClure, the associate administrator of the General Services Administration's Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies, introduced a government social media timeline in a blog post on the new citizen engagement platform, Citizen.apps.gov and called on the American people to send "the important U.S. government milestones you know about by emailing them to us at GovNewMedia@gsa.gov."

Here's what the timeline looks like so far:

Over the past four years, thousands of government officials, representatives and agencies have joined Twitter. Over 200 members of the U.S. Congress are on the service now, according to TweetCongress. How will the social media darling of Silicon Valley serve the government market? What will its first "government liaison" do? "Ev and Biz are excited to see high-level official accounts exchange information on Twitter," said Sean Garrett (@SG), Twitter's vice president of communications, speaking in an exclusive interview when I visited Twitter's offices earlier this summer.

That information exchange is far from limited to activity within the continental United States, given the success of Hugo Chavez on Twitter or the more than 35 verified world leaders on the service. That group now includes Dmitry Medvedev and @KremlinRussia, which joined Twitter in late June. "It's great to to have the President of Russia using it," said Garrett, who was present for the visit.

If you've ever flown, then you know this scenario: Your flight leaves at the crack of dawn. If you leave home with several hours to spare, you'll blow through an empty security line - but then what? Will the flight be delayed, leaving you with a two hour wait? In that case you'd rather not leave home so early.

With the Transportation Security Administration's new app, My TSA, you no longer have to worry.

In early December a Supernova session entitled, How Startup Companies Can Change the World had presenters brainstorm ways to connect the technology industry with policy makers. Coupled with many of the discussions already taking place in the Gov. 2.0 movement, the session looked at how technologists can contribute to projects they might not normally be associated with. This morning we received news on how one initiative is taking this collaboration further by applying the labor-on-demand service model so common to startups and putting it to use for disaster relief.

The words "fat cats in Washington" have been uttered in every corner of the nation from Texas to the Bay, yet DC's tech scene is anything but sluggish. Companies like AOL, Nextel, MCI and Uunet found early success in the region and since then, a slew of young entrepreneurs have emerged to follow suit. Some of the companies include LivingSocial, Clearspring, CareerBuilder, OPower and iPhone app development service PointAbout.

Both YouTube and the White House announced today that this year's State of the Union address will be broadcast on the YouTube channel Citizentube, as well as streamed live and broadcast to your iPhone. In addition to these Internet broadcasts, both announced that the average Joe or Jane Citizen would get a chance to ask the president some questions this time around, by way of a contest on Google Moderator.

Sounds like a great day for Internet democracy, right? We wonder if crowdsourcing is the way to get the hard-hitting, journalistic questions delivered to the president's doorstep or if it will turn into yet another Internet meme. And even if the right questions get asked, will the format result in just another rehearsed, prepackaged answer?

The good folks at UK open government consultancy Delib have just released a short documentary about the United States' first year since President Obama's Open Government memorandum.

The documentary was shot by Delib founder Chris Quigley over two months last year, both on location in Washington DC and via Skype.

In a blog post this week, U.S. Navy CIO Rob Carey wrote that social media is a resource for the American military that should be used to build trust and collaboration, both within and outside the organization.

In attempts to balance communication, transparency, and operational security, the military has encountered both practical obstacles and general criticism. In a recent podcast, Carey said, "Most social networking tools come with no rules of the road. As the Internet moves towards user-generated content, we thought there was a void we could fill... to mitigate some of the security risks associated with social media."