Longtime PdF readers may remember that for a while we had a page on the site that showed which Members of Congress were most being talked about in the blogosphere, a ranking system that was built for us by Aaron Swartz, using incoming links to their official congressional web sites as one metric, and using blog posts referencing their names as a second metric. We called it "HotPols," but ultimately we took it down because we weren't happy with either metric: too many posts were being counted that referred to people with the same name as a Member (take Adam Smith as once obvious example) and not enough bloggers were bothering to link to the Members' web pages for that metric to show anything meaningful. Well, I'm pleased to say that now we've got a much better window into who in Congress is driving attention online, thanks to the great folks at OpenCongress.

Just the other day I was talking with some colleagues wondering why there where never ever "Bushism" ringtones that become widespread.

If all politics is local, then locally-focused blogs are obviously important to anyone engaged in politics. But since the internet doesn't come with zipcodes attached to urls, it's not obvious how to discover these nodes of conversation and community? How to find blogs that are local hubs? Here are seven easy (and free) steps you can take:

1. Look up your location (town, city, state) in Placeblogger.com, a spanking new directory of 650 "hyper-local" bloggers built by former journalist and blogger Lisa Williams (of H2Otown), with advisory help from Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor. (Full disclosure: I'm fans of all three.) Since the site is new, the coverage is still choppy (Williams only has two blogs for Baltimore, for example, and one hasn't updated in more than a month), but I expect it will grow as local bloggers use its registration tool to chime in. Placeblogger has ambitions of selling ads across its whole network of sites, which may become a magnet for local blogs to come on-board. (UPDATE: I got this wrong; having mis-heard something I thought Lisa said about Placeblogger last summer up at Harvard. She informs me that there is no such plan; I will have a more detailed post about her ideas for the site up shortly.)

It seems as if everyone is rolling out interesting bits of political technology as Election Day approaches. Here are some of the more intriguing examples I've come across in the last few days; feel free to add your own to the list by adding a comment.

--First up is VoterStory.org, a distributed web “widget” to help record and gather individual voter problems experienced on Election Day. Anyone can add this tool to their website by adding a bit of code to their header, and all information they collect will be automatically referred to voter protection organizations for investigation.

It was developed by Rob Stuart and his company, EvolveStrategies, with funding from the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Open Society Institute. Those foundations have long been involved in supporting nonpartisan voter protection hotlines and legal work, so it's very smart of them to invest in extending their information gathering network to the web.

Having discovered Evoca through Sherrod Brown's use of the service to enable campaign supporters to post audio endorsements on his website, I emailed the company's CEO and co-founder Murem Sharpe to find out more. She is a technology entrepreneur and former Fortune 500 executive who worked on Capitol Hill during college and post-college.

PDF: Does it cost anything to use this service?

Evoca offers a free account with up to 60 minutes of recording. If someone has more to say, for $4.99 per month, we offer up to 200 minutes of recording time. We also offer transcriptions and translations through a simple click and order. Pricing varies by language. Members also can sell and purchase premium recordings.

PDF: Where are the audio files stored and who owns them? Are there assurances that the files can't be misused, or is that risk inherent?

The audio files are stored on Evoca and are owned by the person who creates them. Evoca.com acts as a venue for users to create, organize, share, and search audio recordings and does not own any of the content that is hosted on the service. A member can choose to make a recording public or private. All public recordings can be downloaded and the HTML code we create for each public recording can be copied/pasted into any blog or website. Private recordings are, well, private. Our privacy settings also apply to albums and groups.

The Bivings Report says that it appears the folks at ThinkProgress, a prolific and well-written blog connected to the Center for American Progress, have been trying to artificially pump up their stories on Digg, Netscape and Reddit. has the story. This blogger adds lots of details. Judd Legum of ThinkProgress disputes the charge. Whichever is true, read Jason Calacanis on the episode and take his advice on how to play fair on social news sites. (Legum#039s response is in Calacanis' comment threads.)

Technorati Tags: Digg, Netscape, puppy

Want to know exactly how the federal government spends your money, or which contractors get the bulk of government deals, or what percentage of those contracts are bid competitively? Or, would you like to find out how much your Member of Congress is worth, or how many Members own stock in specific companies? Feel like checking out who's taken the most trips sponsored by private groups?

Three new databases, one built by OMB Watch and two built by the Center for Responsive Politics, have just gone live, and judging by the intense press interest in the launch, I think there's going to be a lot of new and interesting stories appearing soon. (Full disclosure: I am a consultant to the Sunlight Foundation, which funded these new databases, and helped with this launch.)

OpenSecrets' new searchable database of politicians' personal financial disclosure statements--which have been available for a decade in hard-to-read pdfs--is likely to gain the most immediate attention. LIstening to Sheila Krumholz's description of the data during this morning's press conference, I was amazed to learn that Members of Congress are worth at least $2.4 billion, and that at least half the Senate and one-third of the House were millionaires, compared to just one percent of Americans. (Since Members only report a range of values, CRP used the lower range to compile its totals--which means these numbers are undoubtedly low.) It was also fascinating to learn Members have tens of millions in investments in industries they regulate--for example, that about 60 Members of Congress own stock in Exxon-Mobil, which has been having such a profitable year.

Do you want to blow the whistle on some kind of wrong-doing, but you can't afford the risk of being exposed? Here is the best, most up-to-date guide on how to protect the secrecy of your identity online, written by Ethan Zuckerman, one of my favorite geek-activists. It doesn't require a high degree of technical sophistication, and Zuckerman provides many helpful pointers to make sure you don't leave a traceable digital trail. Bookmark this one; you never know when you might need it.

Technorati Tags: Ethan Zuckerman, privacy, whistleblowing

The Center for Democracy and Technology has put together a handy online guide for anyone involved in electoral politics online called, appropriately, the NetDemocracy Guide. It's an outgrowth of the fight between political bloggers and the Federal Election Commission, which began when the FEC hinted at drastic new regulations that would have unnecessarily curtailed much web-based political speech a little over a year ago, and culminated earlier this year with the agency essentially deciding to leave most unpaid and low-cost online politicking untouched.

The guide does a solid job of explaining the differences between "uncompensated internet activity" that is specifically exempt from regulation, and the kinds of "public communication" that can trigger reporting requirements and conceivably may also count as contributions to campaigns.