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Hacking Congress

Posted by timothy on from the nicely-though dept.

lousyd writes "Paul Ford, a writer and web developer, has kicked off a new column called 'Hacking Congress' on the O'Reilly xml.com web site. The inaugural article, "Screenscraping the Senate", discusses what he hopes to achieve and some of his initial work on turning publicly available information on U.S. Senators into XML data."

2 of 16 comments (clear)

  1. How long before he gets arrested? by dcocos · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Using the phrase "Hacking Congress", is probably a terrorist act. I'm pretty sure that when I drive by the Capitol, my car would get extra scrutiny if that book was in my passenger seat.

    {OT} but I've got Karma to burn And for those unfamilar with the policies in DC, every car that goes within two blocks of the Capitol Building is now searched, which is a major traffic issue seeing as Independence Ave, passes with in this zone and is (rather used to be) one the fastest ways though the city, but now with the every car must be searched issue is a pain in the ass and a traffic nightmare, let alone probably pretty close to violating the 4th Amendment.

  2. He's right, *.senate.gov sites are a mess. by dameron · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've recently publish a political parody site composed of haiku coupled with public domain information gathered from the various .gov and .mil sites on the net.

    I have to agree with the article that the senate sites are some of the homeliest hodgepodges of html I've seen since I typed "+Goth site:geocities.com" into google. Culling information for my site (which I'll plug here: www.dailyhaiku.com has been difficult and exacerbated by a lack of consistent presentation cross government site (*.senate.gov sites are particulary awful).

    In a completely selfish way I'd love it if all images on government sites were tagged in valid xml with copyright information, date and time, subjects, location, etc. As it is I have to guess whether the pictures I appropriate are under copyright or public domain, and I'm just waiting for Zell Miller to send me a letter complaining about that picture of him and that scimitar.

    It looks like this kind of project could make sites like mine more viable and enhance the public's access to government work (which is mostly in the public domain if created by federal employees as part or their work duties).

    -dameron

    --- DailyHaiku.com saying more in 17 syllables than Big Media says all day.