"In addition to their official (house.gov) Web site, a member may maintain another Web site(s), channel(s) or otherwise post material on third-party Web sites," the new House rules read. They also allow members to provide links to or embed outside content on their official sites, provided they include an exit notice indicating the visitor is leaving the House.

The Senate rules also allow for links to be added to official sites. They allow senators to use any third-party site of their choice, but the senators will have an "approved list" of sites for reference.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the change "a significant step forward toward bringing House rules into the multimedia age and allowing for members to effectively communicate with their constituents online."

That's why it is so exciting to let people know about the launch of a brand-new pilot project the Library of Congress is undertaking with Flickr, the enormously popular photo-sharing site that has been a Web 2.0 innovator. If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me).

The project is beginning somewhat modestly, but we hope to learn a lot from it. Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.

The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.

This morning, a member of Congressman Kingston's staff was in the House Staff Gym when the Rayburn House Office Building was put under lockdown due to alleged gun shots. Under guidance of law enforcement officials, the staffer was taken via ambulance to the hospital. She was not injured or shot, just a little shaken up under the circumstances.

We have been in contact with our colleague and she is doing well.

The site included a photo that showed Janzen's midriff in open jeans and the waistband of her underwear.

The photo had been removed by Friday afternoon and entry to parts to her site were restricted to "blog owner friends only."

Michael Brumas, a spokesman for Sessions, would not say if Janzen was using an office computer or blogging on government time.

The Senate conduct handbook states office computers should be for official business, but there are exceptions for personal use.

Because Stormie was not blogging about her work for Senator Sessions, the contents of her blog were of no concern to his office. So what if some random Alabama constituent couldn't handle a little thong? That's the constituent's problem, not Stormie's. It's not like the constituent was tied to a chair in Guantanamo, eyes taped open, forced to stare at Stormie's bare midriff...

When someone calling himself "John Kerry" posted a diary on the popular liberal community blog DailyKos last week, its members reacted with both suspicion and amazement.

Some immediately welcomed Kerry to the community, expressing pleasant surprise that the Massachusetts senator would take part in "our little progressive group blog."

Others, however, were more skeptical. They found it hard to imagine that Kerry himself had posted on DailyKos, since it could have been one of the senator's staffers or even a random person using the senator's name.

But before long, the site's owner, Markos Moulitsas, posted a comment confirming that the diary was legitimate. All told, Kerry's post received 1,219 comments, many friendly and many from members of the community still angry at the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee for losing the election to George W. Bush.