Feed Your Head - RSS Goes to Washington

The Washington Post has embarked on an ambitious project for furthering participatory democracy. The Congressional Voters database will let you look at the votes on every single bill from 1991 to the present - as well as subscribe to any member's voting activity via RSS feed.

What that means is that you can follow closely - very closely, really - the voting of any member of Congress with just a subscription to an RSS feed through your news aggregator. For an exhaustive FAQ on RSS, check out this article on about.com.

Bloglines is my aggregator of choice, and I'll use it as an example in the following how-to:

Subscribing to Pete Domenici's voting record via RSS

1) Begin at the Post's Voter Database homepage.

2) You'll note there are links to subscribing to Member-Specific feeds as well as Recent Votes, (a fairly handy feed to have access to.) For now, click on the link "navigate to his or her page".

3) Choose House or Senate - (if you're looking to subscribe to Pete, it's Senate.)

4) Scroll through the alphabetical list until you see Pete (right below Elizabeth Dole.) Click.

5) You'll be taken to Pete's page. Note the URL address in the address bar - it's http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/d000407/

6) Copy the address and open bloglines in another tab or browser window.

7) Log in to bloglines or create an account.

8) On the left-hand side of your account-screen, click ADD.

9) Enter your URL and click subscribe.

And that's all there is to it - now you'll know everything about every vote your Congressman or Senator votes on.

While it might not erase the nasty stain on its reputation from the Bob Woodward debacle (and hey, here's an interesting factoid - did you know that Bob Woodward was *the* editor that failed to fact-check Janet Cooke's story about the eight-year-old heroin addict in 1981? Has this guy done *any* journalism since Watergate?) this is a great service from the Post that should get USED.

RSS, voting, Congress, woodward

tip o' the hat to Mr. Joshua Bates for the link.