If you have gone to whitehouse.gov since Saturday you may not have noticed any real changes. On the outside this is true, but underneath the hood they just replaced the entire engine and drive train.

When President Obama took over at 1600 Pennsylvania one of the first things he did was order the people who manage the White House website to investigate new software. The outcome was a move from expensive and clunky proprietary software to a very familiar open source system – Drupal.

Now I don’t expect all our readers to know what Drupal is, but actually it should be very familiar. Drupal is the same software that powers Crooks and Liars. The software is extremely robust and can be extended beyond you imagination through contributed modules. In the coming months you will see more examples of this as we start rolling out our latest updated that includes countless new features to better engage you – the C&L community.

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I thought this was fascinating. Yes, we've gotten so used to being able to document on demand with our technology - but there's only so far it can go:

Pre-inauguration concertgoers who flocked to the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday sent about 10 times the volume of wireless calls, text messages, pictures and videos as on the busiest hour of a typical day, causing scattered outages that customers who gather for President-elect Barack Obama's swearing-in should expect again today, company officials said.

About 400,000 people surrounded the Reflecting Pool for the three-hour concert, according to some estimates, but much larger crowds are expected to fill the Mall and inaugural parade route today. Major wireless carriers urged customers to expect minor delays and to reduce their usage, but they said networks are expected to handle the surge in use.

"The vast majority of calls went through on the first try," Verizon Wireless spokesman John Johnson said. "We'll be making every adjustment we can make. I don't believe there's any critical capacity we can add, but [Sunday] did help us to do some fine-tuning."

"We did experience some mild call-blocking, as was expected, but with the capacity we added and the number of calls we got on the network and the amount of activity, our network worked about as well as we expected," said Crystal Davis, a spokeswoman for Sprint Nextel.

The industry has prepared for months to boost capacity, anticipating record-breaking demand. Companies have spent millions of dollars to add radio channels, install mobile cell towers, expand in-building wireless coverage and bolster network capacity.

But just as adding lanes on a highway won't stop congestion if too many people get on the road at the same time, the changes might not prevent problems, industry spokesmen said.

Another piece of the Bush legacy, according to a poll of leading scientists carried out by The Independent. The collective international failure to curb the growing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has meant that an alternative to merely curbing emissions may become necessary.

The plan would involve highly controversial proposals to lower global temperatures artificially through daringly ambitious schemes that either reduce sunlight levels by man-made means or take CO2 out of the air. This "geoengineering" approach – including schemes such as fertilising the oceans with iron to stimulate algal blooms – would have been dismissed as a distraction a few years ago but is now being seen by the majority of scientists we surveyed as a viable emergency backup plan that could save the planet from the worst effects of climate change, at least until deep cuts are made in CO2 emissions.

What has worried many of the experts, who include recognised authorities from the world's leading universities and research institutes, as well as a Nobel Laureate, is the failure to curb global greenhouse gas emissions through international agreements, namely the Kyoto Treaty, and recent studies indicating that the Earth's natural carbon "sinks" are becoming less efficient at absorbing man-made CO2 from the atmosphere.

Levels of CO2 have continued to increase during the past decade since the treaty was agreed and they are now rising faster than even the worst-case scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body. In the meantime the natural absorption of CO2 by the world's forests and oceans has decreased significantly. Most of the scientists we polled agreed that the failure to curb emissions of CO2, which are increasing at a rate of 1 per cent a year, has created the need for an emergency "plan B" involving research, development and possible implementation of a worldwide geoengineering strategy.

On December 20, 2008 President-elect Obama introduced the team of men and women who will head up the nation's major scientific departments.

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Over the course of the 2008 election, Barack Obama's campaign has leap-frogged John McCain online. As CBS, ABC and Politico (among others) have documented, Team Obama has far out-paced McCain in deploying web technology to fundraise, establish social networks, advertise to targeted audiences, build email lists and otherwise facilitate grassroots organizing. Now, with the release this week of its new application for the iPhone, the Obama campaign has added a powerful new tool to help its supporters get out the vote, literally wherever they are.

The Obama '08 iPhone application (available for free) brings much of the content and functionality of the Obama web site to the Apple mobile device now used by millions of Americans. Users can access positions on the issues, receive breaking campaign updates, get national and local campaign news, find nearby Obama events and browse video and photos. And as the Los Angeles Times noted, "with the device's global positioning system technology, it will give you directions to the nearest campaign office."

But the real breakthrough for political organizing at the grassroots level is the "Call Friends" feature. In a nutshell, Call Friends turns the iPhone into your own mobile, personal phone bank, letting you call and track the support of the people you know in the states that matter most.

As Stephen Shankland of CNET reported:

The most notable feature "organizes and prioritizes your contacts by key battleground states, making it easy to reach out and make an impact quickly," according to the software.

On my phone, the application ranked contacts in Colorado, Michigan, and New Mexico at the top; at the bottom was a friend whose cell phone has a Texas number, though she actually lives in California.

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