It becomes more and more clear each day how powerful the internet can be as a tool to improve our political process by enabling citizens to be informed. A great example of that is OpenCongress.org. The purpose of the site is to provide information on bills and members of congress. It only took me about two minutes to find 9 feeds on the site that any serious political blogger should have (of course the 9 feeds vary depending on where you live). For each member of the House or the Senate there are feeds for every roll-call vote (voice votes can”t be accurately tracked), for blog entries related to that person, and for news stories related to that person. The nine feeds are those three feeds for each of your senators and your representative. Everyone who is serious about politics should be aware of the members of congress who they have the chance to elect. For the Utah 2nd Congressional District those feeds are:
- Bennett in Blogs
- Bennett News
- Bennett Votes
- Hatch in Blogs
- Hatch News
- Hatch Votes
- Matheson in Blogs
- Matheson News
- Matheson Votes
I have long admired the way Misty Fowler has widgets showing the recent votes of her representative and senators in her sidebar. I don’t know if I will display this kind of thing in my sidebar, but I will definitely be following them in my feed reader. Now I wish I had a site like OpenCongress at the state level.
If they were really serious they’d have a feed called “Utah 2nd Congressional District” that had all nine of those feeds put together. It really wouldn’t be that hard to do either.
Thanks, that is a really valuable link.
Jordy,
You’re right about how easy it would be. Just use Feedblendr. For the feeds I listed above – here is a unified feed.
(http://feedblendr.com/blends/25371 also has other feed formats and options for viewing the contents of those feeds combined)