President Obama is still looking for a national chief technology officer to help forge U.S. technology policy, but today he did something that could have even more impact, at least in the short run. He announced the appointment of a chief information officer to help drag the federal government's vast and ossified computer infrastructure into the Facebook age.

Obama's pick is Vivek Kundra, 34, who is currently chief technology officer for the District of Columbia. He will be expected to expand uses of cutting-edge technology, but also to make sane investments. Judging by his track record, citizens might soon see some concrete changes: new ways to access public information, new online tools for communicating with federal agencies, and access to new databases. One way to reform federal IT would be more effective information sharing between agencies (did anyone say CIA and FBI?). The federal government certainly has a sorry history of white-elephant IT upgrades, including a bungled FBI computer overhaul well described in this Washington Post story of a couple of years ago.

Kundra's plans already include a data.gov website to provide the public with vast amounts of searchable government information. All this will be a vast leap in scale from the current offerings of his DC website, which has been an interesting test bed for making local government more responsive and transparent. There, you can do things like download maps of Wi-Fi access spots and view city contracts. He also launched an apps for democracy contest that resulted in residents suggesting Web and phone applications that would do things like provide better access to crime reports. He's even been pushing to allow people to pay their parking tickets via Facebook. In a statement, Obama said, "I have directed him to work to ensure that we are using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations."

Candidate Barack Obama built up something unique in its scale and power: a 13 million-strong email list of supporters, together with data on their beliefs and history of campaign volunteerism.

As the presidential campaign progressed, his staff proved adept at dispatching specific and geographically targeted instructions to the masses: "Call ten people in Ohio today", "Donate $5 by midnight and anonymous donor will match it", "Get out to vote" These were jobs anyone could understand. And the goal was straightforward: get the man elected.

Now we have a president who is trying to mass-email his way to a legislative victory. President Obama--more accurately, his campaign organization, now using the moniker "Organizing for America"--is deploying that list to rallying support for the stimulus package.

But you can almost hear the behind-the-scenes debate: How, exactly, is Lucy in Des Moines supposed to take action on an $800-odd billion stimulus package? What would you have her do--join in an email campaign aimed at nailing a particular Congressman to the wall? And how can we expect Frank in Utica to understand a massive bill whose contents are murky even to the people who are supposed to vote on it? Should we sell him on the fact that the stimulus bill would allow him to deduct the sales tax on his next Ford F-150?

No, the outcome has been a more nebulous campaign. Organizing for America provided a place for people to post their stories of recession angst, and encouraged them to spread their stories around to each other. This morning's missive from Obama campaign manager David Plouffe explained: "Ordinary people are telling the real story of the struggles and pressures families are facing right now. They drive home the importance of this recovery plan and the need to put it into action immediately."

The site promises: "As the recovery plan takes shape, we'll be checking back in with some of those who've shared their stories here. They'll report back on their progress, and on the progress of America's recovery from this crisis."

It can hardly be said that any of this has a bearing on the actual legislative process. There are no simple and concrete actions to take, and no way to measure its efficacy. So why bother? For one, it keeps his supporters engaged, if only by giving them a place to vent. And more importantly, the act of story-sharing will mean yet more email address accrue to the Obama organization.

So maybe next time, when Obama pushes his next bill, we'll see something more focussed. "Frank, remember when Lucy sent you her story of recession woe? Well, here's a list of ten people to call right now. We need your help nailing Congressman Jones to the wall...."

Recently, the social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia crashed in a big way, losing about half a terabyte of data in the process, including the backup of that data.

Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff admits that the backup system just wasn't solid enough. Halff has also posted some tools and information on the main Ma.gnolia page that should help users recover some of their data. However, it sounds as though the future of the service may now be in question.

The episode raises some interesting questions. Sebastien Paquet, a professor of computer science at the Universitédu Québec à Montréal, posted nine ways to protect data stored in the cloud, inspired by his own loss of data stored using Ma.gnolia. He and others have taken the opportunity to reexamine their trust in Web 2.0 services.

I say that the problem goes much further. For example, how safe is the data behind something like Wikipedia? Ed Chi, a senior research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and his colleagues have been studying Wikipedia since about 2006 (see my article on their tool, WikiDashboard). In the course of their work, they struggled to get access to live data from Wikipedia that could make their tool more up to date and useful.

Chi told me, "What was difficult about doing this is that the Wikipedia Foundation has a lot of work done by volunteers, and getting access to the live data required application to a special research server, which is only occasionally administered on a volunteer basis. It's amazing that it works at all, as the server really doesn't get much attention and needed maintenance. It is such a valuable resource, so it really should get more attention and caring and feeding."

Chi also suggested that Wikipedia's data is not getting backed up as often as it should be. Losing data from Ma.gnolia is a personal loss for many, but Wikipedia is one of the great achievements of the digital age, and losing even a day's worth of edits would be significant. We can't afford to lose sight of the basic upkeep that will allow us to hold on to what we create.

Losing a large volume of socially created data would be a cultural loss. Wikipedia, Flickr, Twitter, WordPress, etc. store troves of data that will be valuable to future generations. I hope the data is being treated accordingly.