No doubt by now you’ve seen Wordle.net, the awesome java app that creates lovely word clouds of whatever text you feed it? No? Well, you should check it out.
After talking about 1) Wordle and 2) Ender’s Game with my friend Sarah tonight over dinner, I decided to Wordle a few of the non-DRM’d ebooks I’ve collected over the years, starting with, you guessed it:
Our bets were on “Ender” “boys” “others” “battle” and “army” - looks like we didn’t do too badly. This could be a(n extremely dorky) fun new game! Guess the Wordle big words for your favorite book.
This post is brought to you by my current obsession with books+technology, which is entirely the fault of the slick Sony PRS-505 that I bought off of craigslist yesterday.
No, it’s not a joke about lobbyists becoming better hackers! The NY Times announced today that they have developed a Congress API, which aims to expose Congressional data in a format that can easily be consumed by developers writing their own politics-related apps.
From the announcement:
The initial release exposes four types of data: a list of members for a given Congress and chamber, details of a specific roll-call vote, biographical and role information about a specific member of Congress, and a member’s most recent positions on roll-call votes.
The four work together, so you can start by retrieving a list of members, find the one(s) you’re interested in and then fetch additional details through other calls. We built this service to work with other publicly available data sources, so you can identify members of Congress with a seven-character code from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. For individual member responses, we included the numeric ID assigned by GovTrack, a free and open-source service that monitors legislative activity.
The rest of the announcement goes on to detail which data sources they are pulling from, and ends with this call for feedback: “Just as it’s early in the 111th Congress, this API is in its beginning stages, and we have other types of information we plan on adding. Let us know what would be useful to you.”
If you are a political-junkie code-monkey (I know a couple of you read this) and you can think of some things that would be OMFGSOCOOL to have available via this API, you should totally comment. (Only 4 comments are up right now, so it looks like you have a good shot at being heard through the usual blog-comment noise on these kinds of things.)
I’m pretty happy that a major Old Media organization is stepping up to make this data more accessible via software - they’re both performing a public service and carving out a piece of the new media pie for themselves.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see what people do with this API. I hope to see some slick webapps that make keeping up with US politics fun - maybe we can hold the attention of some of the millions of young people who turned out to vote for the first time in November.
