Wow! Many thanks to Jon Udell for his recent writeup on his conversation with Greg Elin about the Sunlight Foundation. I’m subscribed to his podcast feed, so I’ll hear the actual interview soon enough, but the overview was enough to send me scrambling over to OpenCongress. It’s amazing! I frequently use THOMAS at the LIbrary of Congress to track legislative information, but OpenCongress has far more flexible tools. Each bill’s information page (example) includes RSS feeds, aggregation of news and blogger coverage, and appears well maintained.

There are also fun geek toys like the bill status widget generator, which let’s you build a javascript widget to stick on your homepage that updates with the status information for some bill you’re interested in. (Stick it right next to your last.fm favorite artists widget, perhaps). All in all, I’m very impressed with OpenCongress, and looking forward to using this effective monitoring framework once our legislators return to Washington next month.

UPDATE: Heh…turns out I’ve had OpenCongress as a del.icio.us bookmark since 2005. I vaguely remember the old site…they’ve come a LONG way.

UPDATE: Ugh…I have NO memory. I already blogged these guys!! This cracks me up.