Longtime PdF readers may remember that for a while we had a page on the site that showed which Members of Congress were most being talked about in the blogosphere, a ranking system that was built for us by Aaron Swartz, using incoming links to their official congressional web sites as one metric, and using blog posts referencing their names as a second metric. We called it “HotPols,” but ultimately we took it down because we weren’t happy with either metric: too many posts were being counted that referred to people with the same name as a Member (take Adam Smith as once obvious example) and not enough bloggers were bothering to link to the Members’ web pages for that metric to show anything meaningful.
Well, I’m pleased to say that now we’ve got a much better window into who in Congress is driving attention online, thanks to the great folks at OpenCongress. (Full disclosure: OpenCongress is a joint project of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation, which I consult for.) Their site already does a terrific job of filtering blog references to Members, and they use both Technorati and Google Blog Search to build their data-sets. Now they’ve unveiled a syndication service that lets anyone export and display on their own site a bunch of interesting measures, including the top five Senators or House members being blogged about in the last seven days, which we’ve included in our right-hand rail.
You can also show the Members, or the bills, that are being most mentioned in the news, as well as a host of other interesting meta-data being generated by users of OpenCongress, such as which bills are being most viewed, or the top search terms. As far as I know all of these are tracking series for the last seven days, so the data is useful for discovering what people or topics are hot now, or getting hotter.
One last bit of info-porn: if you click on the bottom of any of these badges, where you see the words “more Senators” or “more Representatives,” you see a full list of the whole Congress, ranked by who is being most discussed in the blogs and/or the news right now. Could Rep. Rahm Emanuel be happy to discover he’s got one-tenth the blog juice of Rep. Dennis Kucinich?
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