Howdy all… you might have seen my blog post over at www.mindtouch.com/blog about getting in the spirit of governmental openness. Our CEO (Aaron Fulkerson) is attending the Gov2.0Camp in Washington DC, and will even be presenting a workshop there focusing on using Deki to learn more about the people that make the laws some of us we all live by.

In the blog post, I talked about the new Sunlight Labs extension (read more about it here). The information retrieved from Sunlight is fairly straightforward, but is mostly useful when mashed up with other functions and APIs (such as the Twitter mashup at the bottom of that tutorial). Today I wrote up an extension that talks to the Capitol Words remote API (functionality seen here at the Capitol Words API). This retrieves information about topics discussed, when they were discussed, and who discussed it. For example, I discovered today that Barney Frank said the word “gentlewoman” 76 times in 2007 (it was his 6th most used word that year!). While that info in and of itself isn’t anything more than amusing at best, when you start pulling in that data and putting it up against other information, trends start to appear. Yes, you can watch topics come and go, maybe seeing what’s hot and what’s fallen out of favor in politics. What if, however, I were to do a comparison between the big topic of the day and what MY representative spoke about that same day? It may very well be that my representative was up there blabbering about a Museum of Tea Kettles while everyone else was talking about Afghanistan. I can track his or her points of focus, what projects they are championing, and even whether they’re ahead of (or behind) the political trend. THAT’S powerful information.

So check it out! It’s currently running at our developer site. Going forward, I’d like to mash this up with some line charting so that you can visually track topics in Washington. Maybe even match that line against what my reps are speaking about, if for no other reason than I could see how far off-base they really are. If you have any suggestions as to possible uses or improvements, please feel free to let me know.

The XML for this extension can be found here.