Your help is needed with a small but meaningful effort to get Members of Congress more aware of when the blogosphere is talking about them.

Whenever you mention a Member, can you try to link to their official web site? (The jumping off point to get their addresses from Thomas is here.)

At PDF, we've built a tool called "HotPols" that uses Technorati's tracking of the whole 6-million-plus-strong blogosphere to rank Members by who is being linked to most. Actually an 18-year-old freshman at Stanford named Aaron Swartz did the coding; he's scary smart).

If you go here you'll see two columns for the Senate. The right-hand one is the one I'm most interested in. That shows Senators ranked by links to their official home page. (It's not a perfect apples-to-apples list at the moment because a few Senators, like Obama, just switched on their official page and up til now their links were all to their campaign site.) But the number of links is low overall, because bloggers often don't bother to find the url. (Though many do link, for example, to Amazon's unique url for a book, which makes Technorati's book talk feature so interesting: )

The left hand column shows links to Senator's names, in this case using Technorati's keyword search tool. Not surprising that John Kerry would rank so high. But the problem with this measure is we get a lot of chaff. Bill Young is not the most popular House member among bloggers, obviously, but until Technorati refines its search engine, any blog post with the words bill and young in it will get counted.

Hence my desire to get bloggers to remember to link to Members' official websites when they mention them.

What's in it for any individual blogger? A little more civic impact, individually...and a lot more collective civic impact as Members start to feel the eyes of the web on their backs.

We're keeping a log of the daily rankings and as more people do this we're going to roll out one additional feature--the ability to see which Members are rising (or falling) in some signficant way, compared to the pack. A way to use the blogosphere as an early-warning system on which Members people are suddenly talking about, and why.

As you know, my brother David is the founder and CEO of Technorati, and that fact certainly has something to do with our using his platform. But he's not paying us to promote this, unless you count his allowing us to run a complicated query on his site (538 queries, one for each member, once a day) as an in-kind contribution. Considering its civic value, I'd say it's not something to get hung up on--but let others be the judge of that. I don't think any of the other blog tracking tools out there are as comprehensive as Technorati's, and that's the main measure.

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