It might just be that the name of the new CTO is less important than we think.

A key message of the Obama campaign and soon-to-be presidency is that government shouldn't be about individuals, it should be about all of us. And if Obama's campaign was about anything, it was about enabling many people to participate via information technology. Take his Web site, for example. Never has it been so easy to work for and donate to a political campaign, no matter who you are. And never has a campaign so quickly converted visitors to supporters. These folks are all about involvement.

So here's a hunch: Under Obama, the Web/social networking team will be more important than the federal CTO. And making heretofore hidden and inscrutable tons of federal data available to and usable by everyone will be more important than the CTO's policy pronouncements. Why data? Because it reveals what is happening in the real world most programs are designed to affect, and because understanding it and applying it and combining it can reveal patterns and trends and deliver insights about the way government is working and ways it can work better.

For a set of small examples of how opening government data to citizens can produce better services look here.

Ugh. That giant sucking sound again, this time as millions of us hear our retirement savings swirl down the drain.

Despite the bailout blow-out, my mind has kept wandering all day to a Washington Post story about Google's new office, of all things. Finally, Bob Gourley, former chief technology officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, helped me understand why.

Missouri's chief information officer recently hired a tiny cat with a red bow tie.

Well, OK, not really. He really hired a recent computer engineering grad for the Department of Natural Resources, according to Government Technology News. But the guy first inquired about the position at the state's job fair in the virtual world Second Life. And his 3D representation in that world, or avatar, is a tiny cat in a tie.

Missouri CIO Dan Ross likely will lose more than 10 percent of his tech corps to retirement in the next decade, so he's recruiting aggressively in the real world too. But he figures his synthetic world ROI is pretty good. "Last year I was reporting about $100 spent. This year we've doubled that to $214. So the ROI is pretty quick," he says.

It was just a matter of time.

I knew someone in the federal market would cop my tag line, “virtual government,” and I knew somebody would start using virtual conference platforms. I just didn’t know the same player would do both at the same time!

On Oct. 15, IBM’s Cognos is holding a “Virtual Government Forum” using InXpo, a virtual events producer.

This post was update Sept. 25, 2008, to correct an error in the name of the Coast Guard's national Security Cutter.

The message couldn't be clearer: Coasties need to start social networking, right now! Yesterday on YouTube, in his firm, ramrod straight-arrow style, Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen ordered his entire service, and especially its leaders, to get into Web 2.0, double time. See it here first:

"We're going to see very shortly in the Coast guard a revolution on how we deal with information management in the new social media, or as some people would call it the Web 2.0," Allen announced. "We need to understand that this is a permanent feature of our environment and we need to understand how to operate in it."