Many of us saw the outburst recently on CNBC by outspoken financial analyst/entertainer Jim Cramer:

Most people probably have at least a solid idea of the financial mechanisms he’s imploring Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to control. For a reliable and accessible review of some basic governmental controls of financial markets, the best source, as [...]

From O’Reilly Radar on Sunday and the New York Times, it looks like Carl Malamud’s been busy, this time working to get legal decisions released into the public domain.  As Tim O’Reilly notes, Carl has a great track record in asserting the public-nature of public information, by digitizing large amounts of information normally accessed under [...]

Overall, I’ve found it difficult to get a clear grasp on the full scope of digital preservation of congressional websites.  Preservation has been somewhat confusing because the administrative organization of the agencies doing the preservation seems somewhat redundant.  While the Government Printing Office, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives and Records Administration all [...]

I’m writing to give a general update on the status of our recommendations, and to give some other various updates. The impact of this project has always been, to some degree, contingent on the clout generated by the distributed expertise of its participants. This list and project will retain their unique productive appeal [...]

When I first wrote about the OpenCongress.org new tools release, I was really excited. The ability to easily syndicate legislative information should help empower government data consumers. They’ve now released a new set of tools, which allow for syndication (through RSS and embeddable boxes) for customizable issues and also specific bills.
This is a [...]

Yesterday evening I came across this post linking to a new Oakland Crimespotting Map, a mashup of public crime information with Microsoft visual earth data. It’s a compelling presentation of important data, presenting structured data in a way that is relevant to our everyday lives.
Combine this sort of data with fixmystreet (a mysociety.org project) [...]

For this week, I’ve decided to look into CRS reports that will help us delve a little further into Congressional reform efforts, from a few different perspectives. This Open House Project post, referencing a Financial Times article, provides a nice highlight reel of state-based transparency reform. The Congressional Research Service product with direct [...]

GovTrack.us is a perfect choice to be our first review as an Insanely Useful Website. GovTrack is one of the original web 2.0 type sources for government information: both an excellent example of a new model of political information distribution, and a compelling story of Web-programming genius expressed as an ambitious civic undertaking.
Josh Tauberer, [...]

I’m starting to experiment with different methods of live lobbying disclosure, posting more frequently about who I’m meeting with where we’re progressing. The twitter badge on the right side of the page displays updates from either the web, or from SMS messages–enabling remote updates in the form of short text messages.
Look for more frequent [...]

Just to clarify what is going on with the lobbying and ethics reform bill, the Legislative Accountability and Transparency Act of 2007 was passed by the House and the Senate will take it up tomorrow. This bill is somewhat different from the original reform bills passed by the House and the Senate earlier in the [...]