As many of you know, I’m not the hugest fan of Katy Perry’s smash hit “I Kissed a Girl.” I was indifferent until she gave all those interviews being like “wait guys I didn’t actually ever kiss a girl, no homo! i just did this because bicuriousity sells! lulz.” (Note: if you don’t understand “no homo” plz click the link and allow Jay Smooth to educate you. kthx.)
But the point: you’ve never heard of Ivri Lider, but he’s this super-famous pop star in Israel who is openly gay. Some giant Israeli radio station you’ve also never heard of asked him to cover “I Kissed a Girl” for their 2008 chart-toppers show, and then he also made this video where he’s all depressed and confused in the restroom of some gay bar because he kissed a girl and he liked it. It’s great.
(Sidenote: if we’re going to talk about bicurious pop stars singing songs entitled “I Kissed a Girl”, I’m partial to Jill Sobule’s 1995 song. Too bad the actual music video isn’t available online, because it’s fabulously campy and it has Fabio in it.)
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.
If you haven’t seen this star-studded 3 minute internet musical, you should. Starring Jack Black, John C. Reilly, Margaret Cho, Neil Patrick Harris, and many more. Book and score written by Mark Shaiman, composer of Hairspray(about six weeks later than he shoulda, he admits).
Since May, The Boston Globe has been publishing an amazing photo blog. Since I found out about it a few months ago, it’s rapidly become one of my favorite RSS feeds. In their own words:
The Big Picture is intended to highlight high-quality, amazing imagery – with a focus on current events, lesser-known stories and, well, just about anything that comes across the wire that looks really interesting.
Recent topics have ranged from the Special Olympics to Sapphire mines in Madagascar to the first ever Formula One race held at night.
