Mr. Froomkin's answer was that newspaper editors are typically "not senstive enough to Web sites," and cited Drudge and the Huffington Post as sites that have taken important cues from readers.

Mr. Froomkin said his editors told him that they "didn't think the column was working anymore" and "traffic was down." "Compared to what?" Mr. Froomkin said. "There were some very banal reasons for traffic going down." He explained that the Washington Post site lost readers after the site changed formats, and that he was still getting his "sea legs" after the Obama administration took over from the Bush regime in the White House.

"There was of course the money issue," Mr. Froomkin said. "I was an easy line item to scratch out."

"What I think is interesting about this story," he continued, "is that it has a 'morality play to it.' It was something that readers clearly said that they wanted, and that I was providing to an extent, that they weren't getting from traditional media."

Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander wrote about the decision to cancel the column and said it was "an often-irreverent online column" and its "slant seemed to attract a large and loyal audience during the Bush administration, but it may have suffered when Barack Obama became president." He also quoted Mr. Froomkin's editor Fred Hiatt, who said, "'His political orientation was not a factor in our decision.'"

Mr. Froomkin said editors "raised the impartial center as a form of religion." But that's not going to work in the current media world, he said. "You need to let the journalists do their job."

"I'm not talking about espousing partisan positions, but allowing them to call the truth as they see it," he said. "Not offending people is not a business model, you've got to have something to say."

"He said, Mark, how do we get a community like you? Tell me how!" remembered Jeff Jarvis, the "Web guru" and preacher of  New Media gospel, who was speaking at Personal Democracy Forum yesterday. (Mr. Jarvis declined to name the scion, so make a guess.) Mr. Jarvis, explaining why a powerful media person would go to a kid for such advice, wrote in a blog post after the event that Mr. Zuckerberg was the kid "who understands this new world in his soul; it’s not the money that should make the moguls jealous but that understanding."

"You can't," was Mr. Zuckerberg's answer. "Full-on geek stare," Mr. Jarvis described to the PDF crowd. "Communities already exist without you," Mr. Jarvis explained. The question you should be asking is, how do you help them do what they want to do better? Mr. Zuckerberg's advice, according to Mr. Jarvis, is to "bring them elegant organization," he said. "If you think about it, that's what government is there for,"
said Mr. Jarvis. "To help us to elegantly organize our communities, our societies, our needs and our lives."

This was the crux of Mr. Jarvis' discussion on how following examples like Wikipedia and Craigslist can help make government more collaborative and participatory.

Mr. Jarvis' idea of a "Googley government," as he described it, is to be truly collaborative and transparent. "We need for transparency to be the default government," he said. "We need a government that is searchable, clickable and linkable." The Freedom of Information Act should not need to exist, he said, because data should already be public and accessible to all citizens.

But people also need to give government the "permission to fail," he said. "We have to find a way to help government try things, experiment, innovate, learn by failing."

Then Mr. Jarvis decided to come out and "play Oprah" to audience members—running around the auditorium with a microphone to allow Personal Democracy Forum attendees to give ideas on what a government in the Google age might look like. "Simple," "easy to understand," "collaborative," "open-source," "throw out the cookie," were some of the responses. Of course, Mr. Jarvis added his own comments to almost every idea, even challenging some of them, like "good design," "rapid response" (Jarvis: "Sometimes deliberate is better") and "get the bugs out" ("We can't make government perfect," Mr. Jarvis reiterated).

Toward the end of the discussion, Mr. Jarvis gave the microphone to one audience member who said: "You're all going to write your congressmen and get them to fund all of this, right?" Right.

"Now, for the first time, the entire country can look at how we're spending money and give us feedback," Mr. Kundra said. "What this dashboard is going to allow us to do, for the first time, as we democratize data, as we make information available, we go to the golden source of that information. ... We're going to tap into some of the best ideas and the best thinking."

Mr. Kundra's IT dashboard, which he first announced on May 27, is a follow-up to Obama administration transparency initiatives like Data.gov, which makes more than 100,000 government data feeds and statistics—from census data to toxic waste release information to health studies and testing scores—available online in one place.

The IT dashboard displays data received from about 28 agencies (from the Department of Labor to the Department of Transportation), information on more than 7,000 federal IT investments and detailed numbers on more than 780 "major" projects (worth $38.6 billion total). The dashboard allows users to examine projects by line item and look at project spending and progress in different charts and graphs in green, yellow and red color codes to indicate whether or not those resources are spent effectively. There are also pictures and contact information for agency CIOs, and social media tools for sharing information.

"What the Obama administration is committed to is laying a new foundation for transparency, accountability and responsibility, especially in how we manage IT investments."

Mr. Kundra said the federal government is the largest single buyer of technology in the world at more than $70 billions dollars annually, and he wants citizens to use this new dashboard to keep tabs on how agency leaders and CIOs are progressing on these projects.

He mentioned a project to build handheld computers for 2010 census workers. Last year, the initiative was nixed and $600 million was lost. If the project was initiated while the dashboard was online, users could examine the 400 "change order" modifications sent to the government contractor. "By change order No. 10, you could tell there was something wrong," Mr. Kundra told the New York Times' Bits blog in June. "It is a leading indicator that they didn't have their requirements figured out very well upfront. Therefore, the statistical likelihood of a failure is very high."

With the new Web site, the problems would've been obvious. And users could've also sent the project managers a memo that there are things like iPhone already out there, and some cheap census software could be coded to help.

Mr. Kundra hopes to "tap into the ingenuity of the American people to show us a better way, to show us an innovative path," he said.

"I nearly fell out of my chair watching that," said Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum, who introduced Mr. Kundra and led a standing ovation for the presentation.

Mr. Kundra said he plans on launching a blog on the site to retrieve feedback and he hopes to build more dashboards with other government data. "We're exploring beyond where we are right now," he said. 

"Is the data perfect? No." Mr. Kundra said. When Andrew Raseij, Personal Democracy Forum co-founder, asked if "public documents" should be redefined as "searchable, accessible and readable online," Mr. Kundra said "yes." But he gave a reality check about access. The federal government is made up of over four million people with 10,000 different systems, he said, and data still exists in paper form, and in computer systems that the government has had to "bring people out of retirement" to extract.

"This is a beta," warned Macon Phillips, new media director of the White House, who was onstage with Mr. Kundra. "This hasn't been done before; I think we'll find some flaws in it," he said, referring to the IT dashboard.

But Obama's team is hoping Personal Democracy Forum members will help them improve these projects. "We are looking to this community, and one of the reasons we launched it here is that you are the important early adopters of this to really push us [and] develop this platform," Mr. Phillips said. "This community is a critical connector between our work—making government more of a platform and more accessible—and the public because you understand both sides. ... If we build these things and nobody uses them, it doesn't matter."

But in fact, she said, sites like MySpace and Facebook are mirroring, even magnifying, our social, political and class divides.

"MySpace has become the ghetto of the digital landscape," Ms. Boyd explained to the crowd. And many of us in these social environments, she said, "have gotten into the habit of crossing the street like we always do to avoid the riff-raff."

In her research, conducted over four years for her fall 2008 dissertation at Berkeley, she found that what we're seeing is "a modern incarnation of White Flight." Facebook users who canceled or abandoned their MySpace accounts are more likely to be white, educated and privileged. Compounding the problem is the press, Ms. Boyd said, "an institution that stems from privilege," which narrated MySpace as "the dangerous underbelly of the Internet while Facebook was the utopian savior."

Indeed, media often portrays Facebook as the reigning king in not only statistics, but as both a business model and a "safer" arena for kids than MySpace (which is, according to the headlines and To Catch a Predator, seething with pedophiles). Yes, more teens go to MySpace and customize their pages with flashy, sparkly texts and music playlists, while an older demographic uses Facebook for business and networking. But, Ms. Boyd said, some teens are using MySpace and some teens are using Facebook, and things got "messy" when she examined who goes where.

"The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to all of us," she said. "It should scare the hell out of us."

"When people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another, they do not communicate with one another; this canon does breed intolerance," Ms. Boyd said. 

Ms. Boyd said it's important to examine these digital divides as social media is described as "the great leveler" during President Obama's campaign and even Iran's Internet "revolution." If politicians and their techie friends make social media an increasingly important tool for government participation they have to examine how their constituents are segregated on these platforms.

When she asked audience members—politicians, technologists and media types—if they use Facebook on a regular basis, nearly every hand shot up. MySpace users were nil. "There's a cultural wall between users," Ms. Boyd said. "If there's no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so."

The Facebook/MySpace class divide is not a new story line. Michael Wolff illustrated the polarity in his signature, tart tone during an interview last December with BusinessWeek's Jon Fine. "If you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin," he said. "And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people."

She pointed out that the language used by Facebook users against MySpace users is what concerns her the most.

Facebook is described by high schoolers as "more cultured" and "less cheesy," she said. "Any high school student who has a Facebook page will tell you MySpace users are more likely to be barely educated and obnoxious," she said. "Like Peet's is more cultured than Starbucks and jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop. And Macs are more cultured than PCs," she said, quoting a 17-year-old student she interviewed during her research.

"People are already divided and we can't expect technology to automatically integrate them and create cultural harmony," Ms. Boyd admitted. But "you need to understand that these divisions exist." If politicians are using Facebook and Twitter to communicate with their users, "you're only seeing a fraction of the population speak out and be loud," she said. "If you're on Twitter, it's a very specific minority that you're speaking to and that minority looks a lot like you."

"Whose voices are you choosing to listen to?" she asked the crowd. Are you willing to write off a huge portion of the population because they're not using the same service as you are? Perhaps some of us should be asking ourselves same questions.

Mr. Bloomberg also said he'd take the grand-prize winner out to dinner.

For the first stage of the contest, which will be called Big Apps, the city will release what Bloomberg described as a “huge volume of data” from various city agencies. (That means the data will be made available in a machine-readable format that’s conducive to programming.) He gave the example of creating a mobile application out of the Health Department’s restaurant grades.

“What we’re trying to do here is create the connectedness that will benefit the city economically, civic-ly and socially,” said Mr. Bloomberg, who was beamed in live on a huge projector screen via Skype. (He wasn’t able to attend the conference in person.)

The announcement appeared to be well-received by techies present at the conference, who quickly began spreading the word via (what else?) Twitter.

The mayor also said that when the “.nyc” top-level domain becomes available—that’s expected to happen in 2010—the city will create a Web site at data.nyc to house all of the data.

Read the rest on NYFi.

Ben got a hearty-ish laugh from the audience with a counter-intuitive analysis of this year’s history-making Democratic nomination fight, which he repeated to me afterwards: "What’s older than a young candidate sweeping away the older, establishment candidate?"

He said it was an old line, but whatever -- it was new to me.