Bush. Energy. Oil. Caribbean? These were the most frequently uttered words in Congress last week, brought to you courtesy of Sunlight’s latest Web site, Capitol Words. Now, you can have an at-a-glance view into the daily proceedings of the United States Congress through the simplest lens available — a single word.

For every day that Congress is in session, Capitol Words displays the most frequently used word in the Congressional Record, dating back to the second session of the 106th Congress (January 20, 2000). (The Congressional Record, published daily, is a complete account of the floor proceedings of the House and Senate.)

We created Capitol Words to make it easy to know what issues Congress is addressing on a daily basis. Whether the congressional word of the day matches up to an issue, an action or the name of a member of Congress, Capitol Words provides a snapshot of the main topic addressed by Congress for any given day. By looking at the site’s calendar view, it’s obvious that ‘energy’ has been a hot topic in Congress this month.

Capitol Words is powered by LOUIS which scraped the Congressional Record on GPO Access. Our Labs also created an API so you can incorporate the word of the day in your applications.

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Update: For some reason it appears the Times has pulled this awesome research tool. I’ll try to find out why.

The New York Times launched an amazing research tool, creating a great online browser for all their content from 1851-1922. The Times is also offering the data in API so that, if you can, you can create your own browser. The Times blog says:

"As part of eliminating TimeSelect, The New York Times has decided to make all the public domain articles from 1851-1922 available free of charge. These articles are all in the form of images scanned from the original paper. In fact from 1851-1980, all 11 million articles are available as images in PDF format. To generate a PDF version of the article takes quite a bit of work — each article is actually composed of numerous smaller TIFF images that need to be scaled and glued together in a coherent fashion."

If you do research - or are in any way in need of scanning the 1855 adverts for local New York haberdashers - this is not to be missed. Check out the TimesMachine. (There might be some kind of server problems right now.)

The article to the left references a large scale congressional investigation into lobbyist actions in an attempt to block President Woodrow Wilson’s tariff bill, a key element of his New Freedom agenda. The investigation sought to discover if Senators had been bribed or received undue influence from these lobbyists and ultimately required every sitting Senator to testify to their personal finances, campaign contritbutions, and relationships with lobbyists and other company agents. This amounted to the first full disclosure by members of Congress in regards to the personal finances, their campaign contributors, and the nature of the lobby. A first for transparency in Congress.

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Here is a cool development. Steve Nelson is displaying information on members of Congress inside Second Life (SLurl location) using the Sunlight Labs's still-in-beta API (Application Programming Interface).

Steve is entering his "U.S. House of Representatives Info Center" in Sunlight's first Web 2.0 Mash-Up contest (deadline April 15). I'm blogging it because it so wonderfully illustrates the phrase Sun Microsystems, Inc.'s CEO Jonathan Schwartz used to explain why Sun, a publically traded Fortune 500 company, decided to embraced open source: "Openness is an accelerant." Openness is an accelerant. None of us in the Labs know the first thing about programming Second Life. Yet, because we have an open web service API for certain data on Congressional Representatives at SunlightlLabs.com/API, someone else could. As the screen shot shows, Second Life members approach Steve's Info Center and then type their zip code into chat. Steve programmed his Info Center to go over the web to SunlightLabs's API and fetch back a photo of the appropriate representative and links to related pages on different accountability web sites.

Our openness accelerated Steve's bringing data we compiled to new users in a new context with new tools. Regardless of your opinion of 3D worlds, how cool is that? To get a bit more geeky, two types of openness enable Steve's Info Center Mash-Up: 1) the openness of web service APIs and 2) the openness Second Life provides to its "citizens" to create virtual objects.

Sunlight Labs rockstar Dr. Carl Anderson created a web service API to a database that cross references zip codes with congressional districts with the IDs different web sites use to use publish dynamic content on members of Congress from their particular databases. Having an API means other developers — like Steve Nelson — can access the cross-referencing we've already done directly from their computer programs thereby accelerating their ability to make new applications with this data. Our API open goodness is then paired with the openness of Second Life's platform that allows members to create and populate its virtual world with structures and objects much the same way AOL's members created and populated AOL with community bulletin boards and chat rooms.

Steve created his interactive congressional display within SL's Capitol Hill, a place for political information he co-created with others. SL's openness accelerates its development by its members. (To experience a different but equally cool Web 2.0 mash-up of congressional data in your standard browser, see www.tetonpost.com/citycon.) If you are citizen of Second Life, visit Steve's Info Center. If you are a developer — Second Life or Web 2.0 — use openness as an accelerant to your own ideas for mashing-up congressional information and enter our Mash Up Contest before the April 15, 2007 deadline for chance to win $2,000. We are eager to see what's next!

Update 04.03.2007 Steve Nelson posted more details on his blog.

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Already the Sunlight Mash-Up Labs announced in May is striding toward my fantasy of one-click political influence disclosure. Last week, Lab Co-director, Greg Elin, guided me through the results of a week of "hacking" with Mike Krejci, lead programmer for The Institute of Money in State Politics. Supported by a small grant from the Sunlight Foundation, Greg went to Portland, Oregon and helped Mike begin work on The Institute’s "web services API".

The Institute tracks campaign finance data on some 18,000 state-office candidates each election cycle and now manages a database of some 14 million records spanning many years. Even though The Institute makes this data available via its respected FollowTheMoney.org web site — which is pretty amazing when you think about it — the fact is getting at that data can be cumbersome, especially when you are on a different web site. As it is now, looking up information on your state candidate means leaving whatever website you are on and going to FollowTheMoney.org and searching through various pages to look up the data you want. 

Web services API changes this picture dramatically. According to Greg, a web services API (short for Application Programmer’s Interface), "is a machine-friendly interface to a web site’s underlying complex database and application."  By adding a web services API to their web site, The Institute is making it significantly easier for programmers at other web sites to dynamically incorporate The Institute’s data into their own web-based applications. And that means in the future you and I won’t have to change web sites to see the data that matters. It will already be there.

To give us non-ubergeeks a sense of this future, Mike and Greg mashed-up a few web page "widgets" which remotely search The Institute’s data. You can try one here. You can search by state, year, office, won/lost, party and even candidate without ever leaving the web page or even reloading the web page. Your search is automatically sent to The Institute’s API in the background which delivers the results dynamically into the page at which you are currently looking.

The ability to easily integrate data from one web site into another really changes the big picture. There’s simply too much data for a single entity to manage. It simply takes too long to bounce from site to site to research subtle patterns of influence buying. But allowing summary data, or detailed data, to more easily move between data silos creates the means to browse — and compare — hundreds of million data points simultaneously. Pretty neat.

Greg tells me Mike still has work to do before the APIs are ready for public release, but that Mike made enough progress they are ready for limited trials with The Institute’s partners. I can’t wait to make further announcements.

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