It's Time for a Wiki White House

[Commentary] Barack Obama's campaign promise to use the Internet to "create a transparent and connected democracy" will be put to the test when he launches a new White House Web site on January 20. On that day, the Bush administration's stodgy, wheezing version of whitehouse.gov will be carted off to the National Archives in its entirety, leaving precisely no legacy - and no limits. Obama is already being touted as the first Internet president, but the Internet is about more than e-mail blasts and rallying the likeminded. If he and his team truly embrace the paradigms of the modern Internet -- as defined by blogs and YouTube, Facebook and Google, instant messaging and crowdsourcing, wikis and reader comments -- Obama's whitehouse.gov will bring unprecedented accountability to the White House. It will offer a vastly better way for the American people to relate to their government -- and maybe even learn to trust it again. (Dan Froomkin writes washingtonpost.com's White House Watch column. He is also deputy editor of NiemanWatchdog.org, a Web site from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University that encourages reporters to ask more probing questions and hold the powerful accountable.)