Filed under: Internet, Features, Blogging, Open Source, Social Software
Open Congress - Keep tabs on your congress critter
If you are hankering to become a policy wonk and find yourself glued to C-SPAN and all things political, you might be interested in OpenCongress.org, a website with all the tools to launch you into political wonkdom. The site is devoted to bringing transparency to government and features a one stop shop for information on bills, related news articles and blog coverage. It is a free, open source, non-profit, non-partisan project managed jointly by the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation.
At the site you have access to Thomas, the website of the Library of Congress, bills, members of Congress, political punditry, votes, and campaign contribution information. And like all bona fide Web 2.0 sites, you can see what issues the majority of readers are most interested in, what bills are the most viewed, what bills are the most reported in news and blogs, etc., all with digg-like ranking buttons. The idea here is to focus public scrutiny on what people care about most and keep everything out in the light.
I went to one of my Member of Congress' site and viewed his votes, an analysis of his votes showed where the majority of his campaign contributions came from (real estate, insurance and finance) and the latest coverage on him from news and blogs. Best of all, there are live feeds to which you can subscribe and get yourself updated when your Member of Congress does anything new. There's even a button to contact your representative so when they do something naughty or nice, you can always be sure to stay in touch.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
