I don't mean to say that the Bush administration is shy about technology. The Whitehouse.gov Web site occasionally runs live chat discussions with administration officials. The chats aren't terribly exciting, but they're one more way to try to bring the government a little bit closer to the people. The White House Office of Management and Budget and other government agencies also have been working overtime and under budget on the tedious but essential task of making federal government services easier for the public to reach online.

Bush, after several years of silence on broadband , said that affordable high-speed Internet access should be available to all Americans by 2007 . And the Bush-Cheney campaign went nuts with the Internet during the last campaign. While the Kerry-Edwards team often languished in the turnaround time it took to respond to the Bush campaign's potshots, Republican staffers ran a slick, streamlined Internet operation that was fearsome to behold. The Bush-Cheney minions used every Internet resource that they could to blackjack the other guys -- repeatedly.

But Bush's personal relationship with technology is mixed. He won praise from some techies when he was spotted in his first term riding a Segway , the high-tech electric scooter, even though he fell off, proving himself more of a bike man . (For the definitive column on this incident, read Kevin Maney's wild take .)

The president has had more success with the Apple iPod , the 21st century's answer to the Walkman. But Bush barely calls the shots on what he listens to, never mind actually controlling the machine. For that he has a personal assistant. We concede that, like many other Americans, he's familiar with operating vehicles like cars and trucks . And no one should dismiss his military service, where he learned how to pilot a jet fighter .

Being president means making a wide berth around the latest tech gadgets, at least for now. Bush is only the second president to run the country at a time when e-mail and the Internet are in widespread use. When Bill Clinton was president, he too avoided e-mail messages, often for reasons similar to his successor's.

Clinton, according to a Reuters article that ran in late January, sent only two e-mails during his entire presidency. The first was a test to make sure that he knew how to hit the send button (really). The live mail was sent to former Ohio Sen. John Glenn (D) who received it on the Space Shuttle while it was in orbit.

Skip Rutherford , president of the Clinton Presidential Foundation , told Reuters that the 42nd president "did not make time to send e-mails," but added that Clinton is "'not a techno-klutz'... . Then as now, Rutherford added, Clinton was more apt to write personal notes or telephone than communicate through e-mail."

But that was Bill Clinton. Imagine how this column would look today if we had a thousand votes in the opposite direction in Florida in 2000. We would have a president who not only invented the Internet (Yes, we know Al Gore didn't really say that) but who, with a little persuading, probably would insist on delivering State of the Union addresses via Podcast. We laugh now, but we'll see what happens in 20 years.

If You Don't Like It, Change the Channel

That's how President Bush feels about parents coping with television programming that they find inappropriate for their children. At the same press conference Thursday when he made the off-hand comments about e-mail, Bush said that he thinks there should be a federal standard for indecency, but barring that, he said, "the ultimate responsibility in a consumer-driven economy is for people to say, 'I'm not going to watch it' and turn the knob off. That's how best to make decisions and how best to send influences." He said that government ought to "help parents... send good messages to their children."

His remarks come at a time when Congress is trying to increase the monetary penalties that media companies must pay for broadcasting "indecent" material. It is the latest episode in a saga that began with Janet Jackson 's exposed nipple at the 2004 Super Bowl. Lawmakers are considering several bills on the subject, including one that would extend the Federal Communications Commission 's indecency standards to cable TV and satellite radio.

Bush did not say whether he would support such a move, but his stance is clear: "We're a free society. The marketplace makes decisions. If you don't like something, don't watch it." 'Nuff said.

Tax Talk, the Sequel

In Yesterday's column , I reported that when you file online, IRS rules require you to file -- at the very latest -- by 11:59:59 PM. This produced a great question from reader Raine Devries , editor of Thunder Roads Magazine (which bills itself as the largest distributed motorcycle publication in that already large state of Texas).

Devries wanted to know how the IRS accounts for people who file from different time zones. I asked IRS spokesman Bruce I. Friedland how that works. According to Friedland, the government says taxpayers should simply file their returns by 11:59 p.m. in their local time zones. I sent an e-mail back asking how the IRS would know that we were filing from the place where we claimed to be. Can I file from Alexandria, Virginia, but tell the feds I'm filing from Tacoma, Washington -- three time zones to the west? Friedland said he'd try to find an answer to this temporal question, and we'll post his answer as soon as we get it.

In other tax news, we reported yesterday that slightly more than half of individual taxpayers will file online, the largest number yet. US Postal Service spokeswoman Joanne Veto said that Post Office branches probably will handle about 6.5 million pieces of tax-related mail today. That compares to 40 million pieces on April 15, 2001. It's important to note that the Internet doesn't account for all of that dramatic shift. Many people take their returns to professional services, which then file them electronically. And to give some idea of relativity to these numbers, the Postal Service handles approximately 100 million letters, cards, packages and other material every day between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.

Money Makes the Customer Disappear

We also noted in yesterday's column that Meetup.com plans to lose some customers as it begins charging as much as $19 per month for group organizers to keep using the online meeting service. EBay , by contrast, has always charged sellers to set up virtual stalls at the auction site. But a rise in the cost of doing business there might be contributing to a decline in users.

"EBay Inc., the world's largest Internet marketplace, drew 5 percent fewer visitors to its U.S. Web site in March, the ninth consecutive monthly decline," Bloomberg reported. "The number of visitors dropped to 65.9 million last month from 69.7 million a year earlier, according to ComScore Networks Inc ., a Reston, Virginia-based company that measures Internet use."