It’s the busy season for Internet conferences, with SXSWi recently concluded,* Personal Democracy Forum just ahead and the District’s own PoliticsOnline annual conference sponsored by the Institute for Politics Democracy and the Internet (IPDI) at George Washington University. I was a panelist once during my time writing The Blogometer, if you need any more reason to take it seriously.

Well, here’s one more — IPDI is announcing a new panel that sounds to this blogger as interesting as anything covered in Austin, Texas last weekend. From the announcement e-mail:

[H]ow many of us have actually looked at the user experiences of Members of Congress, as they work through the highs and lows of social media in political office?

Or asked a Senator what it felt like to post the tweet heard around the country?

Now you can.

Join Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Rep. John Culberson (R, TX-7), Rep. Steve Israel (D, NY-2), Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R WA-5), and Rep. Tim Ryan (D, OH-17) for “Elected and Connected: Uses, Dangers, and Benefits of Being an Elected Official in a 2.0 World” on Tuesday, April 21, 2009 at 8:30 a.m. at the 2009 Politics Online Conference.

As alluded to here before, expectations that our duly elected congresscritters would take to blogging (as opposed to merely commissioning staff-written blogs) never did pan out, owing in largest part I believe to time constraints and authenticity. Then-Senator Obama’s lengthy commentary/response at/to Daily Kos in 2005 may stand alone in this regard, although I still suspect he did not write it alone.

YouTube has generated more member participation but still is mostly the product of their staff. Twitter on the other hand is entirely intelligible and within the capacity of anyone familiar with a BlackBerry, which nearly all of them are. Here, for the first time, members of Congress may actually have something to say about social media. Not to mention, Culberson (@johnculberson) and McCaskill (@clairemc) are widely considered among the savviest Twitter users on the Hill.

All sounds interesting to me, and if you agree, you can register online here.

*So if you were wondering why this blog went silent for a week, now you know.

Anyway, I’ll be delivering an all-new slide presentation (or “Powerpoint,” if you prefer) about Wikipedia, different from the SEO/reputation management talk I’ve been giving for nearly a year now in various incarnations (available for download on SlideShare). This one doesn’t really have a fixed name either, but it’s up on the board as “Govt + Wikipedia: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly + Tools for Transparency.” Once it’s ready I’ll be posting it to SlideShare as well, so watch for the link to appear in this space later today, and for this paragraph to be modified accordingly. For the sake of planning ahead, the link will go inside these brackets: [Click here.] If you’re in the District and interested in coming down to see it, here be the coordinates:

Institute for Politics Democracy & the Internet
George Washington University
805 21st Street NW
Washington, DC 20052
Room 309

For those who have been around town since Tucker Carlson could last be seen on CNN, it’s the building where Jon Stewart berated him on “Crossfire”.

In addition, I’m going to have another big announcement here very soon. Watch for it Monday (and if it’s already Monday, click right on head. Here’s a hint: Some version of this is indeed coming back — just not to Blog P.I.

I don’t know about you, but I’d like to learn a little more about that Drinking Liberally group.
– Ex-White House adviser Karl Rove

The only phrase I identified with on the screen was Drinking Liberally.
– Ex-Senator Max Cleland (D-Georgia)

This afternoon I hit up an invite-only conference sponsored by Yahoo (okay, Yahoo!), “Citizen 2.0: Radically Rethinking Democracy in the Political Age.”

The two keynotes, Karl Rove and Max Cleland, didn’t have much in common besides their receding hairlines — though they did get along swimmingly, considering everything and all. And they did both take the opportunity to riff on the lefty drinking club with chapters nationwide, featured in a video segment prepared by Yahoo!, Drinking Liberally.

Their utterances were separated by about 30 minutes, so one could say it was a recurring theme. All the more so, the Drinking Liberally badinage continued on as Cleland self-deprecatingly compared his own medicore Internet skills to common blood alcohol levels, coining a term no less silly than Yahoo’s!: Citizen 0.1.

Afterward there was a cocktail reception, and then I took some colleagues to another happy hour. Rest assured, however, I was only drinking moderately.