Consumer Reports WebWatch and the Center for Media and Democracy (our partners on Congresspedia) joined forces to launch Full Frontal Scrutiny, a blog-driven, wiki-based site dedicated to exposing fake, corporate-funded front groups that are pushing agendas, while hiding their true identity or agenda. Full Frontal Scrutiny will give consumers, voters and citizens a resource for investigating organizations they run across in the media or elsewhere that have popped up to promote a particular opinion or bill in Congress. We love the banner on the site that include this quote from Jonathan Adelstein, commissioner at the FCC: "The American public deserves to know when someone is trying to persuade them." The organizers say it’s this spirit that is their motivation for exposing "hidden persuaders." This is a new battle being waged in the spirit of transparency.

Earlier today, for instance, the site posted a report titled Tricky Wiki, an expose of how public relations pros spin the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

 

"Workers at an array of corporate titans have altered their firms’ Wikipedia entries, in apparent violation of the site’s ideals," including ExxonMobil shining up their environmental record, a pharmaceutical giant making claims that their cancer drugs are better than a rival’s, and PepsiCo deleting references to potential health problems caused by its soft drinks, to name a few.

Craig Newmark, Sunlight board member, has checked it out and is impressed. "I’ve taken a good look at all involved, and they’re for real, CU and CMD have outstanding records for integrity and accuracy," Craig writes at The Huffington Post.

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Just before I left town for a two-week break, Sunlight announced its first round of grants for 2007, totaling just over $200,000. On my return, I realized that we hadn't posted anything about them — other than a press release — and so our readers might have missed the news. We are staying the course in terms of the kind of investments were are making with the money going to organizations that are using new "Web 2.0" technology to further the organization's mission of putting information into citizens' hands to increase transparency in Congress. We believe that our grantees are on the cutting edge of work that will open up our legislative branch.

The first grant of $140,000 to the Center for Media and Democracy, is to support the second year of the joint Sunlight Foundation/Center wiki on Congress - Congresspedia. The second year's work is building on the highly successful first year and will focus on growing and developing the community of Congresspedia users and editors and increasing the user-friendliness of the wiki.

The second grant of $55,000 will support the Center for Democracy and Technology's Open CRS project, to use the Internet to promote the distribution of Congressional Research Service reports to the public. This grant will allow CDT to make some major technical upgrades to the site to ensure complete and timely access to CRS reports, develop new features and functions, and launch a campaign to promote the site's availability and attract new partners.

The third, and final grant of this round, was for $22,000 to Taxpayers for Common Sense allow them to develop a comprehensive plan to integrate and advance the use of the Internet and related technologies into their overall work. This work will include an initial assessment and planning process to redesign TCS organizational web presence and online outreach, communication, and constituency development strategies.

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I thought it might be useful to take stock of how much attention the new databases released by Center for Responsive Politics (Congressional Personal Financial Disclosure and Travel) and OMB Watch (Government Grants and Contracts) attracted last week. 

From Massie Ritsch at CRP:

In the first six days that the new personal finances and travel databases were online OpenSecrets.org logged nearly 140,000 unique visitors (though some may have visited over multiple days). OS logged more than 1.6 million page views and more than 7 million hits in that time.

Last week, the Personal Financial Disclosure database was within our top 5 most popular features. The travel site was within the top 20, which is still impressive measured against campaign finance features that have been mainstays of the website for years.

Oct. 10, the day we unveiled these databases, and Oct. 11 were the 7^th and 8^th busiest days ever on OpenSecrets.org, based on unique visitors. The site has not experienced such traffic since just days before the 2004 presidential election. Our peak last week was Wednesday, Oct. 11: 28,592 unique visitors, 348,443 page views and 1,631,576 hits.

 From Gary Bass at OMB Watch:

From last Tuesday through Sunday, we had 20,502 visits (or 207,436 page views, if you like big numbers — and over 900,000 hits if for some reason you like to monitor hits). Total bandwidth over that period has been 18.4 GB.  (By comparison, OMBW’s site, which gets an average of 45,000 monthly visitors, peaked at 15.3 GB for the month of August.) 

There are at least 300 web links referring people to FedSpending.org, many of them from blogs.  Some of the top referring sites are Gov Exec, Instapundit, MetaFilter, TPM Muckraker, Captains Quarters, and Wash Post.

And one of Sunlight’s other major projects - Congresspedia, our joint effort with Center for Media and Democracy - is also posting some new big numbers:

From Conor Kenny, editor of Congresspedia:

 
WOW! SourceWatch hit 75,000 visitors yesterday (280,00 pages served). It’s impossible to separate the statistics for SourceWatch and Congresspedia (since Congresspedia is built on top of the SourceWatch wiki) , but either way it’s a good thing. This is up from about 28,000 visitors per day in the month before Congresspedia debuted.

I think this is a record, but brace yourselves: 56,000 on Saturday, 66,000 on Sunday, and 75,000 yesterday.

Folks, this is just the beginning. 

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