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The President of the United States held a Google+ Hangout today. He fielded questions selected from over 130,000 submissions as well as from five lucky Americans selected to hang out with him live. For the rest of us, it was a streaming video experience. It began with a swooping, dramatic intro, and then Google MC Steve Grove took control of the proceedings.

This is the most user-friendly White House in history. It was a nice experiment in Web-enabled democracy. But despite the great camera angles and the believable-but-composed real-world folks, it stretched the definition of "social media" pretty thin. User-submitted content is good, and the hand-picked live participants get to be involved, but for most of us, it's no different from television.

In a statement on behalf of the Obama administration this morning, a trio of senior officials including the nation's Chief Technology Officer made clear that any anti-piracy legislation passing the President's desk would not create risks of censorship, nor would it condone any alterations to the Internet's domain name system that could invite security dangers.

The statement, which lists all three anti-piracy bills currently under discussion - the PROTECT-IP and OPEN bills in the Senate, and the SOPA bill in the House - is a loud warning shot indicating the President's lack of support, and likely veto, of any legislation that requires tampering with the structure of the Internet to enable enforcement.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs took questions from Twitter users this morning and answered a select few in a video on YouTube.

"Something new," Gibbs Tweeted,"You take first crack. Use #1q in a q & I'll answer 1 on vid before today's briefing. What do you want to know?" Given that this is a public forum, users can see all the questions asked of Gibbs, in addition to the ones he chose to answer. His video reply below.

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:

At 8pm ET tonight, President Obama plans to address the nation about the BP oil spill from the Oval Office. In addition, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs will also answer questions from YouTube users right after the president's address. If you would like to submit your own questions, head over to the White House's YouTube page. Just like during earlier events, the White House is using Google Moderator to collect these questions. YouTube users can then vote which questions they would like Gibbs to answer tonight.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is introducing a collection of community data sets today in an event at the National Academy of Sciences (webcast).

According to the HHS, the program is "a public-private collaboration that is encouraging innovators to utilize community health data to develop applications that help raise awareness of community health performance and spark action to improve health." At today's event a number organizations are demonstrating a preview of their work with the data, including Google, Microsoft and GE.

Dave Cole, on the White House Blog, announced today that WhiteHouse.gov is making some of its custom code open source. A great deal of the code created for and at the White House's online outfit is available as part of Drupal.org.

The current releases are Context HTTP Headers, GovDelivery and NodeEmbed.

The Center for American Progress, a liberal policy and advocacy group, just released an interesting memo (PDF) about the White House's use of Web 2.0. There can be little doubt that the Obama campaign skillfully used the Internet to raise funds and create and manage a grassroots organization that, in the end, carried them to the White House. Now, however, a lot of us have grown a bit restless, looking at how slowly the White House is adopting Web 2.0 tools like social networks and blogs, especially when compared to the Obama campaign. This memo, however, puts things into perspective. While the campaign team dedicated over 170 staffers to new media, the White House New Media team has fewer than 10 full-time employees.