The folks at the Personal Democracy Forum have a fine idea: "to get Members of Congress more aware of when the blogosphere is talking about them."
It's not hard: Just go to the Library of Congress site for a list of URLs. Then link to the member's official site when mentioning him or her in a posting.
There's more on the forum site including this link to a ranking of who's getting the most links. Understand, this is a fairly crude ranking, but it's a start.
When is Google incorporating "blogger.com" into the main Google site, and into their search engine?
Search engines, in particular Google, are the real answer to this issue, particularly if Google et al mine the blogosphere and do a better job of incorporating date relevancy into their algorithms or user-options interface.
Posted by: Frankke Potential | January 27, 2005 at 08:39 PM
While that is indeed a wonderful suggestion, do we have enough faith in our elected representatives that they even understand the medium enough to make appropriate use of it?
Living as I do in Canada, I've had the pleasure of dealing with a Member of Parliament who scrunched his brow when I asked him how I could contact him via e-mail. Sure, he had an official parliamentary e-mail address, and even a fancy web site. But between his ears, he had no clue.
Until the technology-literate have a greater representation in elected office, I fear we'll be swimming upstream (this despite Inventor-of-the-Internet-Al-Gore's claims to the contrary.)
Carmi Levy
http://writteninc.blogspot.com
Posted by: Carmi Levy | January 28, 2005 at 05:53 AM
They'll begin to take notice once the blogosphere takes part in making real, electoral trouble for one of them.
There's also GovTrack, which tracks legislation and blogs talking about it.
Posted by: Jared | January 28, 2005 at 06:58 AM
The three things needed are, search, Search and SEARCH.
Why Dan and some of the others here wish to go back to 1998 era, Yahoo-ish multilevel categorization as the data organizing principle - for what is merely another segment of online content - is beyond ken.
Posted by: Frankke Potential | January 28, 2005 at 10:21 AM
"...Inventor-of-the-Internet-Al-Gore..."
Carmi, please to get the facts straight.
Posted by: Anna | January 28, 2005 at 01:22 PM