And, shouldn’t the Franking Commission tackle all Internet communications at once, or can the House.gov server handle blogs if congressmen start using Blogger en masse?

On your notion of elected officials using non-taxpayer funded resources for so-called “thought-leader issues,” I agree with you in concept but by principle, the elected person is still elected if he has a personal Blogger account which ties into my last paragraph.

I suspect much of the concern stems from an overblown sense of the relevance and importance of house.gov. Internet-savvy politicians should realize that running their own site, that has been search-engine optimized to be found more easily than house.gov, is a better strategy than worrying about whether they can link or embed content from the official website. Most people don’t even know who Mike Capuano is and they are not going to find him by browsing house.gov. I would think the goal for an elected official should be to keep the official sites limited and official, then use their private resources to build non-public funded issue sites that reinforce their “thought-leader” positions on issues…bottom line, those official websites are going to suck, so lower the playing field for the folks who don’t know any better and put your resources into a website free from public rules.