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Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Keep Track of Congress with RSS, Email or Twitter

Unless you watch C-Span twenty-four hours a day it can be difficult to keep up with the many bills that Congress passes in to law. Wouldn't it be great to find a site that would logically list the bills, and tell you who voted for what? There is a site that does this, and more.

Plogress.com is a new project to provide current information on what Senators and Representatives are currently doing in Congress. The site maintains separate blogs, or web logs, for each senator and representative covering what they've done, or haven't done in Congress. You can find out what bills and amendments they've sponsored, and what action has been taken on that legislation

The best part of this site is that it uses Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to track each Representative, so if you have an RSS reader, you can subscribe to the individual feed for your Representative, and have these updates delivered right to your computer. that's so cool!

If you don't use an RSS, or Really Simple Syndication reader, you can always add the individual Representative's web log to your favorites and keep up with them by visiting that page from time to time.

Click here to visit the Plogress.com web site: http://www.plogress.com.

GovTrack.us

Here's another great way to keep track of Congress. From the website:

"GovTrack.us is a nexus of information about the United States Congress, following the status of federal legislation and the activities of your senators and representatives".

"GovTrack is an independent website run by a graduate student in his spare time. Data is collected from the official government websites via automated processes daily".

Users of the site can subscribe to follow just the events that interest them. Events, like the passage of bills, are sent to users on a daily or weekly basis by email, or through RSS/Atom feeds.

Click this link to visit GovTrack.us.

TweetCongress

Allows you to contact your government representative via Twitter and petition them. Phone numbers, fax numbers and websites are listed for each representative. You can also petition non-Twitter Congress representatives to join and have direct conversations with their constituents.

Click this link to Tweet Congress: http://tweetcongress.org.

Tweet This Post

Posted by APH's Social Media Coordinator, Michael McCarty at 12:07 PM

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Syndication

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts. Users of RSS content use programs called feed "readers" or "aggregators": the user subscribes to a feed by supplying to his or her reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user's subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.

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