Running the government? There's an app for that...

Government 2.0 is just around the corner. This week, the White House announced the launch of the government's very own app store, a place for various arms of the fedeal government to get their assorted IT needs met. It's an effort to streamline and lower the cost of said IT needs via a methodology known as "cloud computing" -- basically a fancy name for centralizing servers and data and accessing them over a network (i.e., what you and I might call "using the Internet"). Whether it will work to save money or not is anyone's guess; the government is pretty good at wasting your money, even when faced with ostensibly smart business practices. But it's hard to argue that the approach is anything other than a step in the right direction.

And you'll probably be hearing a lot about it in the near future, since a big chunk of that app site is dedicated to the various social networking tech out there, including such classics as Wordpress and Flickr. So now, when the Department of the Interior goes on a giant cocaine-and-subordinate-sex binge, we'll be able to bypass media spin and just read their coke-fueled tweets and blogs and look at the pictures they post of the whole debauched party on their official Flickr pool.