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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.

U.S. government agencies can now officially use YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, and blip.tv, using special service agreements that comply with federal terms and conditions. Today, the General Services Administration (GSA) announced that, after nine months of negotiations, the government has signed agreements with these companies that will allow federal agencies to officially post content to these sites. The GSA is also negotiating special terms and conditions with MySpace and Facebook, and it has already determined that Twitter's service agreement is in line with federal requirements.

The White House has launched a new web site where anyone can submit and vote up their most important questions for President Obama about the economy. That's right - the White House has a Digg clone! At least for the next two days. Activity on the site will culminate in Obama addressing the top questions on Thursday, March 26.

Few topics are galvanizing the American public right now like the stimulus bill and how the stimulus money will be spent. ShovelWatch is a joint project of not-for-profit news organization ProPublica, PRI's The Takeaway, and WNYC Radio that plans to track the "stimulus from bills to building." ShovelWatch currently aggregates the best stories about the stimulus bill from all three sites and will feature more original reporting from citizens in the future. The site also features some of the most informative infographics about the stimulus bill.

The president's weekly video address was often called the 'YouTube address,' but after complaints from privacy activists, the White House has now decided to leave YouTube behind and use Akamai's content delivery network to embed the president's weekly address on the White House web site. The White House will still post videos to YouTube, but, by default, it now directs visitors to Vimeo instead of Google's streaming video service.

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.