Legistalker - The latest online activity of Congress Members.

Legistalker makes it easy for you to stay on top of what your elected officials say and how they vote.

Legistalker was created by Forum One Communications as an entry for the Apps for America competition. The ever-growing database is updated every 20 seconds, and relies on data from Twitter, YouTube, Capitol Words, literally hundreds of different news sources, and others.

Sunlight Labs has an update on the status of data.gov:

Data.gov gets an update, by Clay, Sunlight Labs, June 19 2009.

Data.gov has given itself a slight upgrade, adding a bunch more feeds. To compensate, Data.gov has turned itself into three subcatalogs: A raw data catalog, a tool catalog and a geodata catalog.

www.youtube.com/USNationalArchives

Thanks and a tip of the hat to Kate.

This article does an excellent job of explaining the issues involved in picking someone to head the Census Bureau.

• Census Pick Illustrates Broader Obama Strategy, by Michael J. O'Neil, The Huffington Post, June 15, 2009.

If you need a non-statistician's explanation of why sampling and estimation is as accurate as an actual enumeration, consider your last blood test: did they remove and test ALL your blood?. These matters are beyond any scientific dispute. Yes, sampling is theory -- the same way gravity is theory.

The UK Open University has a series of 9 short interviews with Internet pioneers available on iTunes:

• The Internet at 40 [iTunes link].

Listen to Vincent Cerf, Donald Davies, Tim Berners-Lee, Ray Tomlinson, David Filo and Jerry Yang, "Weld Pond" and "Mudge," and Shawn Fanning.

Even if you know the history of the Internet, you'll probably enjoy these interviews. One of my favorites is the conversation with Rodney Harrison, a Lecturer in Heritage Studies at The Open University, about a his "Cyber Archaeology" research of Second Life.

Note that transcripts of each interview are available as well.

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, the university dean of William E. Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York reads Little Dorrit on four different devices and tells us what she learned from the experience.

• Reading Dickens Four Ways: How 'Little Dorrit' fares in multiple text formats, By ANN KIRSCHNER, Chronicle of Higher Education, Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 39, (June 12, 2009) Page B16 [subscription required]. Also available for a short time without a subscription.

I found her comments useful and interesting in general, not just for readers of novels. She has good insights into the utility and attractiveness of these different devices (if I may call a Penguin paperback a "device"!). She has her own preferences ("The iPhone is a Kindle killer"), but gives you enough information to help you draw your own conclusions.

Amidst all the hype and speculation and technological predictions about ebooks and multimedia, this is the first really useful article I have come across that gave me a good sense of the strengths and weaknesses of these tools. She even quotes some of her friends who repeat the hype and speculations that we hear so often.

This is the first thing I have read that makes me believe that someone may actually prefer reading a hearing on an iPhone!

Be prepared!

Of course, this is all from the user's perspective. She does not provide the perspective of the archivist, preservationist, or privacy-advocate. My wife (who adores taking her Kindle along when she travels) says everyone who stops her and asks to see it asks the same question: "Can I share Kindle books with others?" And her sad response is always, "No, Amazon does not allow you to share."

An article and an editorial this morning highlight the problems that the 2010 census faces:

• GOP Blocks Census Nominee, By JAKE SHERMAN, Wall Street Journal, JUNE 9, 2009.
• Census Follies, Continued, editorial, New York Times, June 8, 2009.

A new web site: whitehouse.gov/Recovery/. "While WhiteHouse.gov/Recovery will be the place where our story of Recovery is told, you can always go to Recovery.gov to make sure your recovery dollars are going where they should: jobs, jobs, jobs."

White House Unveils New Stimulus Site, Tech Daily Dose, June 8, 2009. "The White House Web team unveiled yet another Web page on Monday -- WhiteHouse.gov/Recovery -- that provides snapshots of economic stimulus package dollars at work around the country."

Steven Aftergood describes a new report on the State Dept. Office of the Historian and the Foreign Relations of the United States series:

• Something “Very Wrong” in State Dept History Office, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, June 8, 2009.
• Management Review of the Office of the Historian, (Report Number ISP-I-09-43), State Department Office of Inspector General, May 2009.

With plummeting employee morale and departures of experienced staff historians, “something in HO is very wrong,” the Inspector General concluded. “HO is suffering from, and has for some time been handicapped by, serious mismanagement...

Under present circumstances, the task of the FRUS series, although mandated by law, is “almost unachievable,” the IG said.

Ars Technica has a good evaluation of Google Lab's new product Google Squared.

• Google squares the Web, hilarity ensues, By John Timmer, Ars Technica, June 4, 2009.

Timmer says that Google Squared "takes a spreadsheet-like approach to finding information on the Web. It's tempting to speculate that this is a bit of a response to Wolfram Alpha..." (see Making the world's knowledge computable).

Unfortunately, so far, the results are decidedly mixed. "Google Labs have admitted, knowing how to populate both the rows and columns is a real challenge. Think how often inappropriate results appear within the top 10 results of a search, and you'll get a sense of how often the wrong material shows up in the rows."

Where Wolfram apparently takes the approach of building a database of information and presenting information from it intelligently, Google apparently takes the approach of using the entire web as a "database" and hope it can algorithmically build a valid table of results on the fly.

The White House Blog has a nice summary of Open Government Brainstorm sponsored by the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA). It says the brainstorm generated more than 1000 ideas.

• Wrap-Up of the Open Government Brainstorming: Transparency, White House Blog, June 2, 2009.

A few items of interest to whet your appetite:

• Convert Depository Libraries around the country into Regional Data Centers
• Use Data.gov as a repository of newly declassified information
• Make contributed data subject to a waiver of copyright and database rights
• Government should create permalinks on the paragraph level to make documents easier to cite
• Digitize all government research reports and make them available free

Search is too important to leave to one company – even Google, by Cory Doctorow, The Guardian, 2 June 2009.

It's a terrible idea to vest this much power with one company, even one as fun, user-centered and technologically excellent as Google. It's too much power for a handful of companies to wield.

The question of what we can and can't see when we go hunting for answers demands a transparent, participatory solution. There's no dictator benevolent enough to entrust with the power to determine our political, commercial, social and ideological agenda. This is one for The People.

State Dept. Hosts TED Talk, Tech Daily Dose, June 2, 2009.

The State Department on Wednesday afternoon will host the first ever U.S. government-sponsored Technology, Entertainment, Design, or TED, event. Speakers include social-media analyst Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody; philanthropist Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of the Acumen Fund; futurist Stewart Brand, author of the Whole Earth Catalog; economist Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion; and data visionary Hans Rosling, Karolinska Institutet Professor of International Health.... Video from the State Department event will be posted on the TED Web site, www.TED.com.

Resource Shelf has a great posting in honor of the 2009 Special Libraries Association Annual Conference coming up June 14-17 in Washington, DC: Resources of the Week: REALLY Special Libraries, By Shirl Kennedy.

These are not government information collections, per se, but some clearly are related and have government information.

Lately, friends and colleagues have been reminding me that many library directors don't understand the value of having local copies of digital government information when "everything is on the web." Really. That's what some library directors say. This attitude has at least two big problems, one of which is highlighted by this feature on special libraries. The first problem is the one we at FGI write about a lot: the problem of relying on someone else to provide long-term access and preservation to something that your users value. This is the problem of giving up control because you no longer actually have a collection, just pointers.

The other problem is the one that this special libraries feature implies. That is the important role libraries can have (yes, even in the digital age!) of selecting, acquiring, and organizing information from disparate sources into a cohesive collection for a (not necessarily geographically-based) community. I recently read something a user wrote complaining about having to rely on "searching" to find everything. Search works when you know what you are looking for, but when you don't know something exists, or its relationship something you do know exists, you can't search for it. (To some extent this is the problem of undiscovered public knowledge. See Don R. Swanson, "Undiscovered Public Knowledge," Library Quarterly 56, April 1986: 103-118.)

Libraries can build collections that are more usable than random searching of "everything" (that's searchable and still available) by keyword.

The General Services Administration (GSA) has been negotiating terms of service agreements with social networking sites such as Facebook and YouTube so that federal agencies can use of these social media tools without violating federal regulations. See news coverage here:

• GSA signs deals for agencies to use social networking sites, by Jill R. Aitoro, NextGov, 03/25/2009.
• GSA Signs Facebook Agreement, by Gautham Nagesh, TechInsider, 04/29/09.

Joshua Tauberer (who brought us govtrack.us and other useful sites) has done a preliminary analysis of these agreements:

• GSA social media TOS review, Joshua Tauberer’s Blog, May 29th, 2009.

He concludes:

While I am encouraged by the GSA’s forward thinking to make use of the latest technologies developed in the private sector, I believe that working with the private sector poses a number of risks to government data, to the public’s privacy and free speech rights, and to good governance. These risks can be minimized and some useful provisions have been included in the negotiated TOS’s along these lines, but far more careful thinking is necessary.

While several of the TOS addressed accessibility and privacy concerns, none of the TOS addressed security, nondiscrimination, archival access to media, the TOS the public are required to enter into to access government content through these services, and web media data formats.