Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., decided to tweet his response after Sen. David Vitter,R-La., criticized him last week for advocating an end to tax breaks foroil companies, which, Markey said, would remain highly profitable without them. Vitter said that Markey doesn’t seem to understand

Read more here.

NASA is making a full-court press with the use of social networks.  Check out their Connect and Collaborate with NASA website.  There they link to organizational and personal accounts on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, foursquare, Gowalla, ustreamTV, and Myspace.

NASA has quite a collection of social network profiles.  I wouldn’t expect any local government to rival this, but look at NASA’s profiles, and see if you can learn something from how they use Twitter, Facebook, and the like.

RT @Twitter: Tweet with #BPspillmap to report an incident to the Louisiana Bucket Brigade or check out reports so far on this map: http://bit.ly/aeQb0Y

Twitter announced yesterday on it’s official Twitter account the integration of Twitter and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.  The Louisiana Bucket Brigade is a system created by students to allow everyday citizens to report oil in places they frequent, because of the Gulf Shore oil leak.

What is the Oil Spill Crisis Map?

This map visualizes reports of the effects of the BP oil spill submitted via text message, email, twitter and the web. Reports of oil sightings, affected animals, odors, health effects and human factor impacts made by the eyewitnesses and the media populate points on a this public, interactive, web based map. The information will be used to provide data about the impacts of the spill in real time as well as document the story of those that witness it.

Who made this?

The Oil Spill Crisis map is brought to you by the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and was developed in partnership with students of Professor Nathan Morrow of Tulane University. This technology, utilizes the Ushahidi (http://ushahidi.org) crisis mapping platform to map eyewitness accounts of the oil spill disaster. Ushahidi was first used and developed by Kenyan bloggers to display reports of post-election violence. Since then Ushahidi has been used in other emergencies like the Haiti Earthquake (http://haiti.ushahidi.com/) response, Washington DC’s winter blizzard (http://snowmageddoncleanup.com/) and in Atlanta (http://crime.mapatl.com/) to track crime. The Oil Spill Crisis map is first application of Ushahidi in a humanitarian response in the United States.

4. Don’t Auto-Tweet

It’s OK to set up tweets to roll out while you’re away from your desk, but think long and hard before you automate an entire feed to stream into your Twitter account. Users can smell a bot from miles away, and the point of Twitter is to be personally engaging more than blatantly promotional. Also, this might go without saying for the tech-savvy marketers among us, but don’t automatically DM new followers; it’s seen as spam. And never DM someone your account doesn’t also follow.

• Are you using video to market your small business? Not sure it’s worthwhile? Well, consider this: 62% of adult American Internet users watch videos on video-sharing sites* such as YouTube.com.
• If your Facebook business Fan page has more than 100 fans, you are in the top 65%* of all users.
• If you post at least one Twitter update per day, you are among the top 15% most active Twitter users*.
• If you have 100 Twitter followers or more, you are among the top 7% of Twitter users as measured by number of followers.

If you need help hitting any of these benchmarks, govfresh recently had a good article on the subject, titled “Social media in government is like riding a bike.”

Why do I tell this story? Because I think government can greatly benefit from a “small glider bike” when first taking on social media. Too many agencies are reluctant to try not just because they’re afraid of falling, but because some mistakes lead to severe consequences.

Something I didn’t know, but the Library of Congress archives lots of websites (from the LoC blog):

So if you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.

We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations.

The Federal government, the White House, and the Library of Congress are taking Twitter seriously- are you?  Let us know in the comments.

The White House wants to identify Grand Challenges in science and technology that will help inspire a new era of innovation. And they’re asking for your ideas, right on Twitter. These challenges will inspire innovations that create jobs, improve education, power clean energy, transform health care, and more.

Here’s how to help:

1. Think big! Imagine an ambitious science or technology challenge (something huge like the moon landing!) which you think can inspire great new ideas and inventions.
2. Reply to the @whitehouse tweet with your idea, or a link to ideas you find interesting. Use the hashtag #whgc.
3. Encourage your friends and followers to respond, too!

This is a pretty neat way to use the social networking site Twitter to help the country. And you organization could do something similar by polling Facebook friends or Twitter users in your community.

And just so you know this is real, here’s the tweet from @whitehouse:

What Grand Challenge should be on our Nation’s to-do list? Reply w/your idea now! http://bit.ly/dy9fkL #whgc

TechCrunch covered this story.

About this page, FEMA writes:

FEMA has been engaging in Web 2.0 tools and on social media sites nationwide as part of its mission to prepare the nation for disasters. FEMA’s goals with social media are: to provide timely and accurate information related to disaster preparedness response and recovery; provide the public with another avenue for insight into the agency’s operations; and engage in what has already become a critical medium in today’s world of communications. FEMA’s social media ventures function as supplemental outreach, and as appropriate channels for unofficial input.

All FEMA social media accounts outside of the www.FEMA.gov domain carry the branded femainfocus look and feel. This provides consistency and accountability for content in that the public and our partners can rest assured it is the authorized FEMA account and that the information is accurate. Citizens can engage more easily with the emergency management community through social media sites, and increase their role in disaster preparedness, response and recovery.

FEMA has wholeheartedly engaged social media, how does your organization stack up?