I was passed along a birth announcement this week from a proud mama – someone over at the Department of Ecology heralding the birth of the agency’s new blog.  It’s called ECOconnect and you might like to read it if you’re into the Great Outdoors and things of the green variety.

This is the second agency-of-the-outdoors to spring to life in the last month – Department of Natural Resources started one in May. Folks there are still experimenting with features and hope to attract more attention to it.

Government blogs are not new, but the amount of agency action that has popped up online over the last six month is wild. So far in 2009, we’ve seen the  Olympia crowd do a mass migration onto Twitter and Facebook and all types of online nooks in between: the Attorney General started a Facebook group to get people jazzed about protecting themselves against ID theft, while the Gov is tweeting congrats about the latest college sports win, and lawmakers have been busy posting legislative video updates for the constituents on YouTube and blogging their positions.

With the monsoon of additions and new profiles, it’s hard to keep track of it all, but there’s definitely plenty to talk about.

Know of any other noteworthy local government efforts? How is social media helping you connect with your government (or is it?), and which tools seem to be most useful to you? Let me know via comments or e-mail me some of your thoughts about new media and local government and I’ll share them here.