Political RSS feeds
Will Johnson notes in a post to the OpenHouse Project mailing list that RSS feeds from Members of Congress are almost impossible to find and, "I'm pretty sure that some of the offices aren't aware that their CMS [Content Management System] is generating a feed." To help out he has set up an interesting remix/mashup called PolFeeds, which grabs those feeds as well as those from candidates. He describes it this way:
PolFeeds. n. A website that brings you virtually all of the RSS feeds offered by Presidential Candidates, Members of Congress, and the White House together in one place.
In his post he describes a bit about how flexible this is:
If you want info from a particular politician, you can just go to "name.polfeeds.com". For example, barackobama.polfeeds.com will give you the content for all of Obama's feeds, Twitters, YouTube videos, blog posts, Flickr photos, everything. Of course, you can limit your view to particular types of items. If you want to see only blog posts by House members, you can go to polfeeds.com/house/blog.
Appending "/rss" onto the end of any url will give you the rss feed for the items on that page. You can also subscribe to the feeds individually or create a custom feed. For example, you could put together videos from Pelosi with blog posts from McCain and press releases from Boehner.
Very cool!
Continue readingFastcase Public Library of Law Opens its Doors
The Fastcase Public Library of Law was launched yesterday as "the most comprehensive free resource for legal research online." PLoL claims that it is the largest free law library in the world. A cursory examination shows an easy to use interface with links to caselaw, statutes, and regulations. You can look at federal law or choose your state from a dropdown menu. We'll all have to spend some time trying it out to see if it's a resource we can enthusiastically recommend.
There are also links to content you have to pay for - legal forms, for example, is one of the main tabs but you have to buy the forms after viewing them. I'm not crazy about that - But most of the links are free. Fastcase is a commercial legal research company that specializes in caselaw databases. Offering free, well-organized legal information is probably a smart business decision too if it builds the name and reputation of your company.
Administration shuts down “best-of-web” economicindicators.gov
Forbes has awarded EconomicIndicators.gov one of its “Best of the Web” awards. As Forbes explains, the government site provides an invaluable service to the public for accessing U.S. economic data:
This site is maintained by the Economics and Statistics Administration and combines data collected by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, like GDP and net imports and exports, and the Census Bureau, like retail sales and durable goods shipments. The site simply links to the relevant department’s Web site. This might not seem like a big deal, but doing it yourself -- say, trying to find retail sales data on the Census Bureau’s site -- is such an exercise in futility that it will convince you why this portal is necessary.Yet the Bush administration has decided to shut down this site because of “budgetary constraints,” effective March 1.
Here's a cross-section of the data available: Advance Monthly Sales for Retail and Food Services | Advance Report on Durable Goods | Construction Put in Place | Corporate Profits | Current Account Balance (International Transactions) | Gross Domestic Product | Housing Vacancies and Homeownership | Manufacturer's Shipments, Inventories, and Orders | Manufacturing and Trade: Inventories and Orders | Manufacturing and Trade: Inventories and Sales | Monthly Wholesale Trade | New Residential Construction | New Residential Sales | Personal Income and Outlays | Quarterly Financial Report | Quarterly Services | Retail E-Commerce Sales | U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services | U.S. International Transactions | *sigh* [Thanks ThinkProgress.org] Continue reading(From economicindicators.gov) Due to budgetary constraints, the Economic Indicators service will be discontinued effective March 1, 2008. Economic Indicators.gov is brought to you by the Economics and Statistics Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce. Our mission is to provide timely access to the daily releases of key economic indicators from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau.
Harvard U. Faculty Votes for Open Access
This isn't about government information specifically, but it's big news for proponents of open access everywhere. This story is all over the news this morning - the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Ed., and Inside Higher Ed. among others. Harvard's Arts and Sciences faculty unanimously approved a plan on Tuesday night that will require faculty to post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have online repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard is the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its faculty members’ research publications. Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard who proposed the new policy, said after the vote that the decision “should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.”
The Harvard Crimson has an editorial about the importance of open access to scholarship in which the impact on libraries and scholarship is discussed. The Crimson also reports that the Harvard University Library will be in charge of implementing a new initiative to publish faculty scholarship. The library will set up an Office for Scholarly Communication to make the open-access repository an instrument for access to research across all disciplines in the spirit of the “one-university” environment that their OPAC now provides for holdings in all the libraries.
Siva on Privacy and ‘the Nonopticon’
Siva Vaidhyanathan has an exceptionally good article about privacy in the current The Chronicle of Higher Education.
- Naked in the 'Nonopticon', Surveillance and marketing combine to strip away our privacy By Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, "The Chronicle Review" Volume 54, Issue 23, Page B7, (February 15, 2008). [no subscription requred]
"The Nonopticon" is a state of being watched without knowing that you are being watched or at least not knowing the extent to which you are being watched. Reviewing the book Privacy in Peril by sociologist James B. Rule, he says:
Every incentive in a market economy pushes companies to collect more and better data on us. Every incentive in a state bureaucracy encourages extensive surveillance. Only widespread political action can put a stop to it. Small changes, like better privacy policies by companies like Google and Amazon.com, are not going to make much difference in the long run, Rule argues. The challenge is too large and the risks too great.Continue reading