Managing the volume of content from Congress

The United States Congress generates a lot of content. With the help of two Web sites, it is now possible to make this information more manageable.

• GovTrack.us has a lot of great feeds for the content of Congress.
• Yahoo! Pipes makes it possible to manage them.

Since Pipes makes it possible to mash anything now, I went through and did some mashing on GovTrack feeds.

I took three legislative tracking feeds (New, Active (not new), and Enacted) and split them out over five steps (introduction, committee, votes, passage, enacted) with additional breakdowns for a total of 15 feeds.

Then, I also took the 535 member feeds from all 50 states and 5 territories, stripped out the bill activity leaving just the Congressional Record speeches (and, in the Senate, the speeches about introduced legislation as well), and merged them into a single feed for each state for both the House and Senate (and the 5 territories in the House).

That brings us to a total of 120 feeds for filtering through the volume of material Congress generates every day of the session. Here is an OPML file for importing them into your reader. (You may have to view the source code to see them in your browser. Also, I'll try to keep that file modified if I add/remove feeds from the lists.)

Or, you can just stay tuned to this blog where I'll post the interesting stuff I find from those feeds!

Update: Technical Details

Tim
10,862 days