WiredPen

The Sunlight Foundation recruited citizen journalists to evaluate Congressional websites on three criteria:

• Access to basic information on what our elected officials do in Congress (the bills they sponsor, the committees they serve on)
• information from or access to any of the legally-required disclosures they have to file (on personal finances or junkets they take)
• Any additional information that furthers transparency (their daily schedule, lists of earmarks they’ve asked for or gotten).

The results are in — and a quick comparison of my native state of Georgia with my current home of Washington shows that being in a tech-savvy locale does not necessarily translate to thinking of us voters when it comes to a Congressional website. Ugh. Ugly.

Quibble, if you like, with the choice of measurements and “passing” scores — this was a great test of distributed citizen action.

This is a step-by-step to manually subscribe to an RSS feed using Bloglines.

This step-by-step assumes that you have already created an account at Bloglines and have logged in to the Bloglines homepage. The blog in the tutorial is The Social Customer Manifesto.

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Part three in a workshop series sponsored by UW Department of Communications, the Seattle Chapter of the Association for Women in Communications and the UW Alumni Association. From the promo:

Blogging is one of the hottest buzzwords in communication today, whether we’re talking about journalism, public relations, politics or marketing. Learn what makes blogs different from other Web site forms, analyze a variety of blogging technologies and hosts, and explore how local businesses and media companies are incorporating blogs into their communication mix.

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Newsvine co-founder Calvin Tang provides tips on writing an effective Newsvine seed (effective defined as moving up the Vine!).

WebWare calls Comeeko the “best Web 2.0 site in the history of the universe.” It allows you to tell a story, comic strip style, using your photos and imagination. Not sure about the claim, “as easy as toasting toat” [stet] … but it does seem pretty straightforward! And cute.

The US Patent Office is launching a wiki to help review patent applications: they will not only post the applications, they will “use a rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top,” a la Digg.com. It’s a pilot project — and companies will have to agree to have their application reviewed publicly. But this is a great — even though it starts with software!

At ZD, Mitch Radcliffe links this development with LegalForce, an intellectual property marketplace. He believes the marketplace is essential to transforming the patent review process. It “makes the patent database … easy to use and relevant.”

According to Wikinomics, P&G has already opened its patents to the outside world and has a goal of 50% of new product and service ideas originating from outside the company — by 2010. The authors also note that on average, companies use only about 10% of the patents that they hold. Seems like this opening-up of science and R&D builds on the momentum of sites like InnoCentive and Yet2.com.

Now I understand why folks use third party sites like FeedBurner for RSS feeds … if they change platforms, they don’t have to change their RSS feed URL. I’m moving WiredPen to WordPress … so your RSS feed will break in a day or two. :-/

Advance Apologies!

It’s a week of contrasts: BBC signs a deal with Google to distribute British TV to the world via the web. Contrast that with
ABC/Disney/Academy Awards, which demanded that Oscar clips be removed from YouTube … even though the Academy was not planning to re-use them (no DVD) nor was it showing them on its own website.