White House officials discuss technology challenges

The preservation of information distributed on commercial content-sharing sites, such as blip.tv or the popular miniblog Twitter, is just one of the hurdles federal Web managers must confront in the era of online government, members of the White House's new media team said on Tuesday. To comply with records management policies, some agencies are not distributing any content on social media applications unless it also is on their Web sites, said Bev Godwin, director of online resources and interagency development at the White House, during a discussion of technology challenges at the annual Web content managers' conference in Washington. But such content -- for example Twitter entries -- often is difficult to reproduce verbatim in a format that doesn't look out of place on government Web sites.