This article in the Washington Post is the political class' (e.g. media, politicians, consultants, pollsters') lament that they've lost control of their candidate's message. But in fact it should be a celebratory piece about the fact that citizens are increasingly using the democratizing world of technology to spread the message about what candidates say and really think. Wouldn't you rather rely on YouTube clips, excerpts from speeches, and candid moments filtered by citizen journalists than political advertisements to tell you what a candidate really believes? No contest in my mind.

YouTube has put every campaign on notice that someone's watching," says Scott Reed, a Republican strategist who managed Sen. Robert Dole's 1996 presidential campaign. "This has been a real wake-up call to a lot of candidates who shoot from the lip when there isn't a big TV affiliate standing in the room. . . . Now they have to realize that every day is game day…

Someone's watching? You bet. And we're all better off for it.

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There are really a surprising number of Websites that track legislative activity, most of them the result of enterprising individuals. Probably the database with the biggest reach is the one maintained by the Washington Post. Project Vote Smart’s probably has the longest history. TechPolitics (which houses and mashes census data and other government information along with voting records and provides bill tracking) focuses on House votes and is headed by the very accomplished Ken Colburn. GovTrac, founded and run by linguistics’s graduate student Joshua Tauberer,has an automated system to track bills, issue-by-issue, Congress-wide.

Then there’s Congress Merge, Voter Information Services’ Congressional Toolbox, and Progressive Punch, the latter of which has a really friendly interface.

I’m guessing there are a lot more of these sites and I’d like to build a really comprehensive list. My sense is that a lot of these folks do not know one another and that there might be some kind of terrific synergy out there waiting to happen if Sunlight can connect them.

Let me know what I am missing so we can compile a comprehensive list. And of course, we’ll make it available.

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