While I have no special celebrations, toasts, cakes or melodramatic speeches planned, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has supported this site.

Special thanks goes out to our current contributors, Chris Golden and Nick Troiano as well as our former contributor Alexander Muir.

And a thank you to our readers, especially the ones who actively tweet our links and comment on posts here.

Here’s to another great year. Please help me make this blog even better for 2010.

—Ethan

After a long hiatus so I could focus on my journalism career, today marks the return of Social Government.

You can continue to expect great stories on how Web 2.0 and social media are used in government at both the federal and state/local level. How-to posts like our killer Twitter in government agencies guide will also continue to be regular features.

But when I was rethinking this blog over the summer, I didn’t have to think hard about one thing we could do differently.

I hope this blog becomes an established part of the D.C. community — something I mostly failed to take advantage of in the spring. I hope to attend events like NASA’s Sept. 24 STS-127 Tweetup. I want to meet my readers — government Web managers, developers, community managers and civilian social media fans. I’d love to do in-person interviews and get to know all of you.

But I don’t want to ignore people outside the Beltway, too — the folks involved in state and local governments. Going stateside will return! Please give me some ideas on what I should cover.

Of course, this blog doesn’t work without your participation. Please leave comments on our posts, tweet us or just e-mail me.

Call me crazy, but I encourage you to put me on your agency’s press release distribution list. Oftentimes an interesting project you’re working on will get my attention!

A word about post frequency: I’ll be posting a few times a week — and will focus on quality rather than quantity. If you’re interesting in writing for the blog, drop me a line!

So that’s it for now. I’ll be back with another post later in the day. For now, thanks for reading this and thanks for joining me for the ride … again.

Best,

/s/

Ethan Klapper

Basically, I decided to take the summer off to focus on my personal career aspirations as a journalist. I work as an intern reporter for a mid-sized Gannett newspaper in New York. I’ve been having a blast, but the job requires me to work hard and I realized that I would not have the kind of time I need to run this blog over the summer.

That’s why I took off.

In a way, I regret not writing about all that has been happening lately — particularly the great work of Vivek Kundra and Aneesh Chopra.

However, what I miss most is the great conversations I’ve had with many of you on this blog and on Twitter.

Perhaps most surprising is that my traffic has mostly been stable since I stopped posting. I know there’s an audience out there. That’s why I’m pleased to announce that Social Government will relaunch on Sept. 1. Some things will be done differently, but I’m not running to rename this blog Social Government 2.0.

In particular, I hope to focus more on quality than quantity. I want to get to know people better. I hope most of my posts are original reports.

And following the lead of one of our great contributors, Nick Troiano, I hope to incorporate more multimedia into this site.

If you have any ideas or would like to be a part of the new Social Government, let me know. I’m all ears. As always, I can be reached at ethan@socialgovernment.com or at @socialgovt on Twitter.

Thanks for reading. See you in September!

Ethan

P.S.: I want to pass on two very interesting events I recently got word of:

• The National Institutes of Health will be hosting social media expert Peter Shankman 10 a.m. July 21 at their suburban Maryland campus. For more information and to RSVP, contact levinerac(at)mail.nih.gov.
• For those folks on the west coast, Social Media Club Orange County will be holding a Government 2.0 discussion, also on July 21. Check out the event’s Facebook page for more information.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be looking at Social Government from the ground up and will decide the best way forward.

Rest assured, we’re not gone.

Thanks for your understanding!

Ethan

Seems like we chose the wrong week to take off, since government got a lot more social since the last post here:

• The White House started tweeting!
• The White House, along with about 30 federal agencies (according to Time) also joined Facebook!
• The U.S. Senate now has XML vote data!
• The New York State Senate unveiled a new Web site today, which also includes open data!

Whoa… that’s a lot. In the coming days, we’ll be analyzing all this and more. Stay tuned!

Stay tuned for a new Social Government Radio on Monday! Details forthcoming.

–Ethan

The post I wrote over the weekend on state election Web sites has caused a bit of controversy — I have received numerous e-mail inquiries from state officials who felt I ranked their states too low and officials who questioned the criteria I used to rank the sites. They’ve all been polite and constructive, and I plan to address each one individually, as time permits. Such a reaction is normal when something like this happens, and I am glad that I am getting this type of feedback.

To set the record straight, I looked mostly at design and ease of use aspects of these Web sites, but not what you can or can’t do with them. However, if something cool was there (i.e. provisional ballot tracker in N.C.) or notably missing, I pointed it out. But I simply didn’t have enough time to scour deeply through each and every Web site. I failed to label my rating criteria in the original post and misled a number of my readers. I am deeply sorry for this confusion; I never expected such a situation to happen. Any good study has its methodology available, but this was not designed to be such a deep study — it was merely a glance.

Therefore, I stand by my original reporting here, but apologize for my omission of exactly what I was looking for. Perhaps if I had added the other criteria to the survey, the results might have been different.

I do look forward to communicating with all of the officials who contacted me via e-mail to let them know how I conducted this in more detail and what I feel could be done better with their Web sites.

Thanks for reading.

Here’s some items of interest from the week past.

Sunday

• To kick things off, Sunshine Week releases their 2009 Survey of State Government Information Online.

Monday

• President Obama dusts the cobwebs off his 13 million-strong e-mail list.

Tuesday

• The Sunlight Foundation’s Ellen Miller writes an op-ed in USA Today.
• National CIO Vivek Kundra returns to work.
• …but we learn that Kundra might have a criminal record.

Wednesday

• Colin Delany pens a great piece on Social Media Activism in politics.

Thursday

• The Nation and The Washington Times launch “ask the president.” They’ll send journalists to press conferences to ask questions that citizens submit.

Friday

• The Washington Post reports that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority will be opening up schedule data for services like Google Transit.
• For follow Friday, everyone should check out @AIDSgov, the official Twitter account of the government’s AIDS.gov portal. This is honestly one of the best uses of Twitter and Web 2.0 in government I’ve seen. Reminds me of PandemicFlu.gov. Nice job, HHS!

1. Twitter In Government Agencies: Best Practices (Feb. 16)
2. New Media in the States (March 3)
3. Best Practices: Google Maps for Government (Feb. 26)
4. New Media and the Military (Feb. 22)
5. Social Media in Rulemaking is a No-No Because of 1946 Law (Feb. 23)

Readers: tell us how to improve the site! If you have a tip, suggestion, comment, design idea or want to contribute, e-mail me: ethan (at) socialgovernment.com!

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If there is anything I’m missing here, please let me know! Let’s meet our community!