U.S. House of Representatives on Twitter

[Tim McGhee]

In case you would like to help me beta test this...

The floor of the U.S. House of Representatives on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/HouseFloor

It's updated every five minutes with any new information from:
http://gov.mtopgroup.com/hfloor  (a redirect to the House Clerk page)

I have an email version of this available if you're interested.

Tim
11,009 days


--
Tim McGhee
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http://tim.mtopgroup.com

Psalm 90:12
So teach us to number our days,
That we may gain a heart of wisdom.  
http://numberyourdays.com

[John Wonderlich]

Tim,

This is very cool.  (I say this as a recent twitter convert.)

Can I ask what the steps are between the House page and the twitter feed?  I imagine that would be a process similar to the one that Josh Ruihley used to set up his public laws feed, which lists laws as they're published.  I recently figured out how to use netvibes, and this discovery has allowed me to spread my attention online more efficiently.  The creation of this kind of tool is interesting to me.

Also, I'm really looking forward to netvibes allowing users to share universes.  That would mean that I can share the portal I've made myself for perceiving information online that I know I'd like to follow, by letting others open a set of netvibes tabs as though they are me.  Here's a netvibes screenshot, featuring an RSS feed from the gov't reform committee. 

Anyone know of tools like netvibes or yahoo pipes they'd like to point out? 

John

--
John Wonderlich

Program Director
The Sunlight Foundation
(202) 742-1520 ext. 234

[Tim McGhee]

Hi John,

Thank you for your interest.

For this particular twitter, it was not as simple as setting up a Twitter account and then a Twitterfeed link.  (In fact, the opposite: this Twitter is now probably the only live RSS feed for the House floor.)

It's a simple perl/shell script that downloads the floor proceedings page every five minutes, compares it to the last download looking for content changes, filters for just new content, runs it through a few regular expressions for formatting, and then uses TTYtter to post it to Twitter.
http://www.floodgap.com/software/ttytter/

I'm curious to see if this takes off on the Hill or not.

I put together a bunch of Yahoo! Pipes a while back that filter Josh T.'s GovTrack feeds for various steps in the legislative process:
http://more.gov.mtopgroup.com/2007/03/managing-volume-of-content-from.html

OPML of the 21 Yahoo! Pipes:
http://gov.mtopgroup.com/ref/art1/rss/govtrack-yahoo-pipes.txt

With TwitterFeed, any one of those pipes could very easily be made into a Twitter.  I prefer to use Google Reader for those, but Twitter is perfect for the kind of live feed from the House floor.  I usually just want to know what's going on at the time anyway, but it has been useful and educational to follow.  The email version works very well with Gmail's conversation view.

Tim
11,010 days

P.S. Here's another fun one:  twitters at sunrise and sunset in DC with weather information and forecasts:
http://twitter.com/SunDC

[Tim McGhee]

Hey folks,

Somehow HouseFloor ended up into protected mode today, and the number of followers dropped from 20 to 4.  I must have accidentally checked the box, but I don't remember doing so at all.  I just noticed a strange drop in followers, and then later the little lock icon next to the name.

If you were one of the 16 that got dropped, please accept my apologies.
This should now be fixed so you can resubscribe to your heart's content.

Tim
11,014 days

On 7/27/07, Tim McGhee <tim...@gmail.com> wrote: