So, it’s a new era. Did you enjoy the inaugural? Because it’s time to forget about that stuff and get the people back to work.

The administration of Barack Obama is already making some steps toward taking its new technology initiatives to the White House, but plenty of challenges remain.

Right at noon, the Obama team rolled out the new White House website at whitehouse.gov – folding in many of the features from change.gov (except the actual user comments and content – is that all gone now?), including a blog and the Office of the Public Liaison, where users can submit their comments for the Administration in 500 words or less.

In his first post as White House Director of New Media, Macon Phillips noted there would be more changes to come, and announced that the White House would post all Executive Orders and Proclamations on the site. He also noted as has been widely reported that the President would post all non-emergency bills passed by Congress on the site for five days to let users comment on them before he considers signing them.

Will there be issues that public opinion could sway the White House? Will we have a news conference where the President says, “The people spoke up, and so I am vetoing this bill?” It seems a little hard to conceive of – but even giving people the chance to get their voices on the record (and one would assume this record must be preserved) is a step toward openness, and a noteworthy one.

But the White House site is just one route to continuing the conversation online. There are a number of other sites that could be folded into a new entity. There’s MyBarackObama.com – the big kahuna in all this – with millions of members and more importantly, a way to let users engage each other. There usaservice.org – the site launched for the Day of Service on January 19th, that shares the localization and event planning features of the campaign site – but neither of these sites have been significantly updated on Day 1.

And, there’s the “Organizing for America” initiative that Obama mentioned in his weekly address last Saturday. The White House will somehow partner with the Democratic National Committee to launch this new initiative, but the announcement shed little light on it.

With an estimated 13 million people signed up with the campaign, re-energizing this base to stay involved will be a critical challenge. Whether it can be done within the restrictions and requirements of the Presidential Records Act and other laws is something we’ll be watching.

But it only seems to make sense that Obama would look outside the White House to move this powerful coalition of the people forward. No matter how much he wants to make the White House more open and transparent, the only way to build an effective network for change will be to ply the role of running water, and flow around the obstacles.