December 11, 2005, 1:38 AM ET
NYT names chicagocrime.org 'influential'
The New York Times Magazine's annual "Ideas" issue calls my chicagocrime.org site "the most influential mashup this year." Thanks, New York Times.
Personally, I would've voted for the urinal mashup.
December 5, 2005, 3:12 PM ET
Announcing washingtonpost.com's U.S. Congress Votes Database
Finally, we've launched the first big project I've worked on at my job at washingtonpost.com. It's the U.S. Congress Votes Database, which lets you browse every vote in the U.S. Congress since 1991.
You can browse votes in a variety of ways -- both in aggregate and for individual members of Congress. For example, here's the page for Barack Obama.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed for any senator or representative, to keep tabs on how your elected officials are voting. See the RSS page for more info.
It's got several interesting aggregations for each Congress, such as votes that happened after midnight, vote missers and, on a lighter note, vote totals by astrological sign.
The site is updated daily, depending on whether any new data is available from the House and Senate.
I did the Web development and collaborated closely with Congress expert Derek Willis on the content and data. Of course, the site is powered by Django, the best way to build database-driven Web sites.
The ink is far from dry on this project -- a search engine and several other features are still on the way -- and we're very interested in hearing any ideas on how we can expand it. Post a comment, or drop me a line, if you can think of anything we could add.
