Congress is back today from its August ("Townhall Meeting") recess and Advanced Legal Research classes are starting up. There is no better time to look at how to track Congressional activity via Web 2.0 tools.
Interested in a particular bill? Using these two sites you can have information about any bill sent to you via email or, using your RSS reader, it will magically appear on your desktop.
1. GovTrack.us. This is an official government site. They freely admit to using material from Thomas, the Library of Congress site. But, GovTrack.us makes use of a series of Web 2.0 tools to allow tracking bills, resolutions, the activities of members of Congress, voting records, and actions by Congressional committees. As you can see, they added most of these tools this summer. The most interesting is a widget to allow you to have automatic feeds posted to your website or facebook page.
2. OpenCongress.org. This is a private site posted by the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. The interface is different from GovTrack.us. OpenCongress.org, however seems to have a slightly easier to use RSS feed mechanism with a completely intuitive "subscribe to this bill" feature that sends updates about a particular bill right to your reader. This site also have a "Battle Royale" feature that aggregates users' reactions to a particular bill (approval ratings, comments, tracking and so forth).
It is worth taking a look at this post by Peggy Garvin on LLRX or this one by Jason Sowards on the RIPS blog to get a fuller picture of these two sites.
Don't have a reader? Try the reader that comes with MyYahoo or iGoogle. Don't like the interface? Branch out and try Bloglines, Google Reader, Newsgator, Netvibes or one of the dozens of free RSS aggregators.
