Is the Internet good for democracy, or not? John Palfrey is up leading a distributed conversation on that topic for the second plenary session. I'm going to take notes on the conversation, but as always treat these as paraphrases at best.

Confronted by the prospect of internet-driven public participation in crafting legislation, the past head of the American League of Lobbyists says, "What's next? Are we going to let the American people decide our defense policy, our trade policy, our immigration policy?"

I'm at the National Press Club for the launch of Stanford Prof. Larry Lessig's new project, Change-Congress.org. He's here as part of Sunshine Week, and his speech is co-sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation (which I consult for) as well as the Omidyar Network. As you may know, last year, Lessig decided to shift his focus from the fight for free culture to the fight for a clean government. Here are my notes on his talk, paraphrasing as best as I can...

A MySpace poll of their users claims that young people are perhaps more politically engaged than older generations; WaPo profiles John McCain, makes another tag cloud; the Slashdot community interviews Garrett Graff, chaos ensues; notes from the annals of e-democracy; results from the first National Presidential Caucus; the National Journal's Technology is closing up shop; a new Politico column from Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry looks at the Republicans and tech; and a new site from Bill Richardson might be the gloomiest thing ever.

John Wonderlich, writing at the Sunlight Foundation blog, picked up on a mashup of earmark data and Google Maps and made an awesome discovery: it’s ridiculously simple to mashup earmark data on Google Earth.

Steve Nelson of Clear Ink has produced a cool build in Second Life that displays information about Congress, pulling data into the metaverse using Sunlight Labs' API. The project is an entry in the Sunlight Foundation's "Mashup Congress and Win" contest that offers a $2,000 prize for "the best 'Web 2.0 Mashup' that displays information about Congress." (PdF's Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are tech advisors for the Sunlight Foundation).