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The State of Utah has released the first iPhone app by a state government and it is pretty impressive. In addition to the directory of departments and services available through the Utah.gov app (iTunes link) there's also a second app available called the Utah Professional License Lookup.

Would you like your local and state governments to offer iPhone apps? We can see some reasons for it and some reasons why it might not be such a good idea.

The Sunlight Foundation, one of the coolest geek organizations on the Internet, announced today that it has added $4 million to its budget compliments of the Omidyar Network, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's group. Sunlight works with government information made publicly available to turn it into websites and services that anyone can find useful.

At the start of what could be the most open US Presidential administrations in decades, the Sunlight Foundation's work should be more potent, interesting and useful in fostering accountability than ever before.

Everyone knows how well Barack Obama's presidential campaign made use of new media to raise money and market the candidate. We also know how big a role social technology played during inauguration week, from handheld flip HD footage appearing on network TV to people reporting on Twitter about what they liked and disliked. After President Obama took office, spirited debates proliferated in the blogosphere about whether or not whitehouse.gov is Web 2.0-enabled and what the role of President Obama's CTO might be. But one striking trend has largely flown under the national radar: the rise of the goverati.

If you want to stay current on the latest updates from U.S. government agencies, you can now find a central repository of RSS feeds with the latest breaking news from these agencies on the newly designed news.USA.gov, the U.S. government's official online portal. The site now hosts a selection of RSS feeds with updates about anything from recent product recalls to press releases about foreign policy issues from the State Department. You can also, of course, read the feeds right on the site.

The Sunlight Foundation's mashup site Capitol Words relaunched this week and now offers a very handy way to see what keywords are being used in the US Congress in general and by particular congress members. If you pay only passing attention to politics, Capitol Words is a great way to familiarize yourself with politicians in a hurry. It's a mashup of several different ways to search the Congressional Record and it's fun to use.

While the tech world eagerly waits to see who Barack Obama will appoint Chief Technology Officer of the United States, a similar appointment of more immediate impact to many people has just occurred. Terence Milholland began work this week as the first Chief Technology Officer in the history of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

He enters an IRS that the General Accounting Office said last week suffers from technology so outdated it leaves the agency with inadequate integrity, reliability and security for sensitive taxpayer information. Check out our coverage of the first IRS CTO and the daunting problems he'll face on our new blog the RWW Jobwire, sponsored by VisualCV.

With the upcoming U.S. elections only 12 days away, Google has released a new web site to help simply and centralize information about voting locations and voter registration. According to a blog post about the new U.S. Voter Info site, Google found it hard to believe that in 2008, this type of important information isn't better organized on the web. Because organizing info is what Google is all about, they took it on themselves to step in where government has not and have created an incredibly useful site for all U.S. citizens.

Remember the "pre-cog" cop-things in Minority Report, able to figure out who was going to commit a crime before they committed it? If that's ever going to happen it looks like it's going to have to be something super-natural - because at least these days, technology is a long way from able to predict who's going to commit a crime.

A new 350 page report released today, written by heavyweights like former US Secretary of Defense William Perry, National Academy of Engineering President Charles Vest and sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, argues that large scale data mining of consumer and other records is of "limited effectiveness" in finding suspects preparing to commit acts of terrorism.

And we've got the answer. Three of them actually: Listen, learn, and let go. Let's face it, Web 2.0 is a buzzword. And when it comes to government, change, and innovation, we have to reach beyond buzzwords. Surprising to some, the government isn't too far beyond.

Government is doing some amazing social media initiatives to better serve their constituents, and why not - social media is all about increasing the democratization of communications. The government serves its people, and thus, it's a perfect match.

Last month US Presidential hopeful John McCain announced an ambitious new proposal that would award a $300 million prize to the inventor of a better battery for powering automobiles. It is a laudable idea and one that could tackle some of the biggest problems the world faces - but it's a proposal grounded in last-century thinking none the less.