I want the Fast Lane to be a true on-line community, and I encourage you to submit your comments and thoughts. After all, if I'm going to insist on twenty-first century solutions for our transportation system, I better communicate in a twenty-first century way!

The blog has received about 11,000 site visits since 10 a.m. compared with 13,000 daily visits to the main DOT Web site, the agency said. Comments are reviewed to make sure they're free of personal attacks, slurs or inappropriate language. If a topic attracts hundreds of comments, an agency spokesman said a representative sample of them may be posted instead.

The agency also plans to start hosting Web chats with Peters and other senior DOT officials as well as building a YouTube.com video page some time this year.

In Peters' second post, she announced from Chicago that the city was awarded a $153 million federal grant to reduce traffic congestion and pollution. Guest blogger Mayor Richard Daley followed with a post of his own thanking the department.

Darrell West, a public policy professor at Brown University, said that government blogs represent an opportunity for officials "to shape and be shaped by public opinion."

"Blogs inherently are interactive and help agencies learn what is on people's minds," he wrote in an e-mail. "I see this as a plus for agency responsiveness."

Yesterday, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, head of Her Majesty's Government, became the first head of government (at least, as far as I can tell) to officially embrace Twitter.

Is this a momentous occasion? It's hard to say. Politicians have been increasingly embracing various forms of social media. Nowhere, for example, do more elected officials actively write blogs than in Europe.

Some have suggested in recent days that Twitter is going mainstream. Perhaps that's the case as well.

To those who don't visit blogs or get their news from them (which a recent poll shows includes the vast majority of the American public) this might seem to be a provincial conflict, but it is highly significant.

In political terms, it underscores the raw, angry and bitter rivalrly between supporters of Obama and Clinton (as I noted in my appearance on CNN's blog segment last Sunday).

The mirror image distrust, hatred and dismissiveness felt by each side towards the others' candidates accentuates by the day - raising the authentic prospect that even in an awful economy the Democrats will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - as some supporters of the losing nomination candidate stay home.

"First, these people should read up on the definition of 'strike.' What they're doing is a 'boycott.' But whatever they call it, I think it's great. It's a big Internet, so I hope they find what they're looking for."

While it could be said that blogs are just a younger person's folly, in our study this is not the case. Just one in ten (19%) Echo Boomers (those aged 18-31) regularly read a political blog and only 17 percent of Gen Xers (those aged 32-43) say the same. Matures (those aged 63 and older) are actually the generation most likely to be political blog readers as just over one-quarter (26%) say they regularly do so followed by 23 percent of Baby Boomers (those aged 44-62). Also, one hears of the rabid blogs on both sides of the political aisle, but just 22 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats regularly read blogs. Independents are the ones slightly more likely to read these, as just over one-quarter (26%) say they regularly read political blogs.

Looking at those who regularly do read political blogs, over half (54%) read one or two at least once a week with an additional 22 percent reading 3-4 at least once a week. And, while they may read these, they do not comment on them. Over two-thirds (69%) of those who regularly read blogs did not comment on one in the previous week. Republicans are slightly more likely than Democrats to comment. One-third of Republicans (34%) commented in the previous week compared to 28 percent of Democrats.

"Politics has become more accessible to young people," Schumer said. "They didn't really get into TV news the way my generation did. You know, when I was younger, the national news was sort of the national living room. That is not even close to true. Everyone read Time magazine or Newsweek. Hardly anyone does anymore."

The second-term senator credited specifically bloggers and the Internet for early successes in the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. According to U.S. News and World Report, from January 3 (day of the Iowa caucuses) to February 5 (Super Tuesday), 19.1 million Americans cast a ballot in a Democratic primary (or caucused as a Democrat) versus just 13.1 million on the Republican side in all the nominating contests.

"Instead things are more fractured, but the bloggers and the Internet has sort of become the medium of choice," Schumer said. "And it's gotten young people involved and excited in politics."

"But I think it's different this time," Schumer said. "I think the Internet is much deeper and more pervasive. Howard Dean used it - it was a brand new thing, 'What is this?' Now it's part of the working world. Hillary's raising a lot of money on the Internet too - not as much as Barack, but she still is. But to me, more the motivation of young people ultimately is, this world is a different world and we better get hold of it and I think that's a great motivation."

They don't call it Super Tuesday for nothing! Today marks an exciting day in the race to the U.S. Presidency: voters in 24 states will choose their party candidates. This will be the largest number of primaries taking place at one time in the history of the U.S. electoral system.

We've joined forces with Twitter to give you instant updates on Super Tuesday. Instead of sitting on the sidelines, you can send a simple text message about your voting experience. Huge turnout? Taking too long in line? Did you just vote for the first time? We want it all, if you can keep to 140 characters or less. (And if candidates can keep their posts to 140 characters, anyone can.)

Throughout the day, you can watch Twitter updates from across the country:

The blog, called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Personal Memos, has been active for over a year and has attracted a wide readership. But despite promising to spend a set amount of time writing the blog, he has seldom managed to post this year.

"Since my last post on the blog, a few months have passed," he writes.

"But this doesn't ‎mean that I have not been keeping my promise of spending 15 minutes per week ‎on it. As a matter of fact, I have spent more than the allocated time on the blog. The ‎magnitude of the reception and acclamation from the viewers was beyond ‎expectations."

As well as writing about his life and policies he also takes time to answer letters from readers.

The fund-raising by Paul, a Texas congressman who is the only Republican to oppose the Iraq war and who has argued for a limited government, was almost as much he took in from July to September. During that time period, he raised $5 million.

But Paul has been outpaced by Republican rivals who have raised tens of millions of dollars. Mitt Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, raked in more than $6.5 million during a daylong telephone marathon in January.

"The message is powerful and the level of frustration in this country that people are sick and tired of what they're getting," Paul told the MSNBC network on Tuesday. "They don't like the war and they don't like the economy. And they like the answers that I've been giving."

The Houston obstetrician-gynecologist has been a fierce critic of the Iraq war, calling for withdrawing U.S. troops. He also has said free trade deals and international groups like the World Trade Organization threaten U.S. independence.

Shelby Bonnie left the company he co-founded with Halsey Minor, CNET, just about one year ago. This morning he launches his next startup, PoliticalBase.

The site, which focuses on local, state and national elections and other political matters, is timed perfectly to take advantage of the 2008 presidential elections and the estimated $4.5 billion that will be spent on advertising to promote candidates and issues.

PoliticalBase is a structured Wiki that encourages research and debate. Users can edit most of the text but can't change the underlying database structure. That allows the site to slice and dice data for comparison purposes (something that can't be done with the free-for-all Wikipedia) but still gives the site's community the ability to create and edit content.

The site is broken down into interconnected categories, including money, people, issues, elections, etc. Clicking on, say Rudy Giuliani shows information on that presidential candidate, including the amount of money raised to date, his religion and party affiliation and biographical information. At the bottom of the page his position on key issues is also shown (for fun, register for the site and click that you do not support him - see how his picture changes).

The mission of the U.S. Department of State is to create a more secure, democratic, and prosperous world for the benefit of the American people and the international community.

Through its websites and other online resources, the Department offers broad public access to a wide range of information. Blogs.state.gov offers the public an alternative source to mainstream media for U.S. foreign policy information. This blog offers the opportunity for participants to discuss important foreign policy issues with senior Department officials.

Initial response to the blog was mixed. "John from Oregon" wrote, "It's great to see some extra sunlight coming into the State Department's long dark corridors with the launch of the new blog today. My hope is that this tried and tested 'disinfectant' can help restore some of the luster to the reputation of the U.S.A. here at home and among our friends throughout the world."

However, "Cynthia from California" noted that, "This new blog seems to be an effort at transparency, but given the U.S. State Department's warlike actions, I'm skeptical that this will actually encourage dialogue. I'm curious to know if this will be a two-way conversation, whether postings will reach people in positions of authority at the State Department. In other words, [will] the public's opinions and concerns be considered and [will] they will have any influence? [Will] the Bush Administration's viewpoint will be promoted here to the exclusion of independent and humane thinking and to the detriment of our country's standing in the world? [Is] this blog simply a PR tool for the Administration disguised as a dialogue? I'm not optimistic for a real exchange of ideas, but I hope I'm wrong."

Still, the hour-long meeting in the Roosevelt Room offered Bush another opportunity to break through what he sees as the filter of the traditional news media, while also reaching out to the providers of a new source of information for soldiers, their families and others who follow the conflict in Iraq closely.

"More and more we are engaging in the new-media world, and these are influential people who have a big following," said Kevin F. Sullivan, the White House communications chief.

Bush told the group that, to his knowledge, it was the first time a president had met with bloggers for a chat at the White House, one of the participants wrote.

Romney, the lone GOP holdout, has posted more videos on his YouTube channel (283 as of Sunday afternoon) than any other presidential candidate, Republican or Democrat. But he has resisted the debate, in which videotaped questions are submitted through YouTube. In an interview with Manchester Union Leader, Romney said, "I think the presidency ought to be held at a higher level than having to answer questions from a snowman."

That drew a video response from Billiam, the snowman who questioned the Democrats on global warming last month in their YouTube debate. This time, he riffed on another Romney quote from the campaign: "Lighten up slightly."

Sources at CNN said the debate, co-hosted with the Republican Party of Florida, will be held at the Mahaffey Theatre in St. Petersburg. Steve Grove, head of news and politics at YouTube, said that more than 1,100 videos have been submitted, and the popular video-sharing site will allow YouTube users to upload their videos until Nov. 27.

Even though users can submit their own questions, CNN is ultimately in charge of picking the questions that are going to be asked. Still, this is a promising development. According to an article on CNN.com, there is a small committee at CNN that is in charge of selecting the questions. David Bohrman, Senior VP for CNN and a member of the selection committee said, "There are questions that we, the journalists, we, the mainstream media, would never think to ask in the presidential debate."

The fact that this debate is even happening just goes to show the enormous impact that user generated-content has had on society. Ten, even five years ago, something like this would have had no chance of happening. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this turns out and hopefully this type of debate becomes more typical in the future.

No one's more surprised at this robust Web presence than Paul himself, a self-described "old-school," "pen-and-paper guy" who's serving his 10th congressional term and was the Libertarian Party's nominee for president in 1988.

"To tell you the truth, I hadn't heard about this YouTube and all the other Internet sites until supporters started gathering in them," confessed Paul, 71, who said that he's raised about $100,000 after each of the three debates. Not bad considering that his campaign had less than $10,000 when his exploratory committee was formed in mid-February. "I tell you I've never raised money as efficiently as that, in all my years in Congress, and all I'm doing is speaking my mind."

That means saying again and again that the Republican Party, especially when it comes to government spending and foreign policy, is in "shambles."

But while many Democrats have welcomed the young and fresh-faced Obama, who's trailing Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) in most public opinion polls, Paul is barely making a dent in the Republican polls.

Republican strategists point out that libertarians, who make up a small but vocal portion of the Republican base, intrinsically gravitate toward the Web's anything-goes, leave-me-alone nature. They also say that his Web presence proves that the Internet can be a great equalizer in the race, giving a much-needed boost to a fringe candidate with little money and only a shadow of the campaign staffs marshaled by Romney, McCain and former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

On June 13, Michael O. Leavitt, Secretary, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, convened a leadership forum on pandemic preparedness, which brought together highly influential leaders from the business, faith, civic and health care sectors to discuss how best to help Americans become more prepared for a possible influenza pandemic. The Department is hosting this five-week blog to expand the conversation as part of an ongoing effort by the Department to help Americans become more prepared. HHS does not edit blog postings and cannot ensure that all included links are functioning. We apologize for any inconvenience.

At the beginning of 2005, I was Google's lone public policy guy. Today, there's a bigger - and growing - team of us scattered around the world, working on issues like privacy, child online safety, copyright and trademark protection, content regulation, reform of the patent system, and broadband policy. These issues are fundamental to the future of the Internet (and of the individuals it empowers), and are increasingly prominent on the agendas of policymakers worldwide.

We're seeking to do public policy advocacy in a Googley way. Yes, we're a multinational corporation that argues for our positions before officials, legislators, and opinion leaders. At the same time, we want our users to be part of the effort, to know what we're saying and why, and to help us refine and improve our policy positions and advocacy strategies. With input and ideas from our users, we'll surely do a better job of fighting for our common interests.

You may be wondering why it contains two months' worth of posts, given that we're only just now launching. Well, we started the blog internally back in April, to limber up our blogging muscles. Now that we've gone public we thought it'd be fun to share our earlier internal posts. In the weeks and months ahead, expect to hear more from us on issues like net neutrality, censorship, innovation regulation, immigration, R&D, national security, and trade, just to name a few. All of the members of Google's global public policy team will be contributing posts (or else - right, team?).

But the larger aim is clearly to woo the sort of tech-savvy Democrats who can harness online gadgetry to benefit the Edwards cause. And Twitter stands out, both for its cachet among true tech cognoscenti and the level of commitment it exacts from users. Plugged in with mobile wireless devices, especially active users post and respond on the site dozens of times a day.

So it's not surprising that Edwards dictates his entries to an aide, who enters them on the site. It's also not surprising that many of the entries are terse to the point of near-semaphores, such as this post of a month ago: "In san antonio."

However, it is surprising to note that Edwards has interactively Twittered his way into committing some actual news. Well-known blogger Robert Scobie came across a Twittered declaration from Edwards that his campaign would be "carbon neutral," and posted a text reply asking how a fast-traveling presidential campaign could ever hope to redress its fearsome carbon-consumption deficit.

Much to Scobie's surprise, Edwards promptly Twittered a promise to offset the carbon he generated by funding alternative-energy research - marking what seems to be the first policy clarification from a major candidate on social software.

So the bloggers weren't even talking about current conditions in Baghdad. That left it to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, former Baghdad bureau chief of The Washington Post -- and author of the heralded 2006 book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" -- who appeared on MSNBC's "Countdown" tonight to debunk this idea of a newly-safe Baghdad. "I talk to Iraqis all the time," he said.

He revealed that there had been steady insurgent artillery shots falling in the supposedly safe "Green Zone" all week, at least two Americans had died there in recent days, and U.S. Embassy staff had been instructed, in a switch, to wear their protective vests outside at all times. He also disclosed that the embassy's pool, scene of much partying in the recent past, has now been declared off-limits to extended stays.

To back up his point that pulling out of Iraq would be a disaster, President Bush had said today, "They have bloggers in Baghdad, just like we've got here," in a speech to the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.

Then he quoted two of them: "Displaced families are returning home, marketplaces are seeing more activity, stores that were long shuttered are now reopening. We feel safer about moving in the city now. Our people want to see this effort succeed."

Only hours later did the White House reveal that the bloggers were brothers, Mohammed and Omar Fadhil, and these supposedly little-known average Joes had met Bush in the Oval Office in 2004. They are dentists and write an English-language blog from Baghdad called IraqTheModel.com, also available via Pajamas Media.

I have been called a patriot, and treated like a criminal. I have been called a Soldier and treated as the enemy. I have been told to get a hair cut and not to eat the civilians. My humor misses most people. Sometimes it is too rough, too dark, and too close to home. But that is what happens when you have seen too much and spoken too little. It finds a way to the surface. A way to be heard.

I have stood by long enough.

I have been mistreated, and I have seen others mistreated. I had the system that is supposed to help me, hurt me. I have seen it hurt others. I have seen this place break a Soldier down. I have seen the hope slowly leeched from a Soldier. Vibrant and full of pride, ready to be healed and return to the fight, broken down, spirit trampled, and hope taken from them. I have seen it. And I have been that Soldier.

"Through a series of highly sophisticated and complex algorithms, this system has determined that you are not presently authorized to use this system function. It could be that you simply mistyped a password, or, it could be that you are some sort of interplanetary alien-being that has no hands and, thus, cannot type." (See screenshot on 2nd page of this post.)

But wait, it gets even weirder:

"If I were a gambler, I would bet that a cat (an orange tabby named Sierra or Harley) somehow jumped onto your keyboard and forgot some of the more important pointers from those typing lessons you paid for. Based on the actual error encountered, I would guess that the feline in question simply forgot to place one or both paws on the appropriate home keys before starting. Then again, I suppose it could have been a keyboard error caused by some form of cosmic radiation; this would fit nicely with my interplanetary alien-being theory."

"You've got this wonderful, imaginative hateful stuff that comes flying out. I think one of the most important takeaways is - it's the classical line - not only should you not believe your own press, you probably shouldn't believe your opposition blogs either."

"I think politics and political coverage has become so polarized in this country...because it's the Internet and the blogs that have really used this White House's press conferences to somehow support positions out in America, political views. And they will clip and digitize portions of these briefings to fit into their particular argument."

Not so, said C-SPAN spokeswoman Jennifer Moire. The videos on Pelosi's blog, called The Gavel, came from the House chamber, where the footage is shot by cameras owned by Congress, not C-SPAN.

"That's in the public domain, it's owned by the American people," Moire said.

The 2008 election will be the first where the Internet will play a central role, not only in terms of how the campaigns use technology, but also in how voter-generated content affects its course. TechPresident.com plans to track all these changes in real-time, covering everything from campaign websites, online advertising and email lists to the postings on YouTube and who's got the fastest growing group of friends on Facebook.

Our team of bloggers is made of veterans of the 2004 and 2006 elections, ranging across the political spectrum. Their expertise covers everything from website design to the latest in mobile tools and social networking sites. And we'll look closely not just at what the campaigns are or are not doing, but what voters and activists are doing online to independently affect the election.

Unlike most politics sites, techpresident.com will be the online equivalent of a trade magazine, aimed at political professionals who need to keep up with the Internet and technology executives involved in creating the tools they use. A group blog with a dozen contributors, it is an extension of Personal Democracy Forum, an online publishing and conference business owned by an Internet entrepreneur, Andrew Raseij.

Although Mr. Raseij has been a donor and adviser to Democratic candidates - he served as chairman of the technology advisory group of the Howard Dean campaign - he has recruited former campaign workers from both parties as bloggers. "When techies talk about technology, they tend to forget their politics," Mr. Raseij said.