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5 Sites To Boost Your Political Awareness

Magazine Chooses ?5 Sites That Will Boost Your Political Awareness?

PC World has named its ?5 Sites That Will Boost Your Political Awareness.? Included on this list are some of my favorite Web sites that I bet are familiar to many of you, too. Here is their list:

FedSpending.org, a searchable database of federal government spending which uses information found in both the Federal Procurement Data System and the Federal Assistance Award Data System. FedSpending.org, created by AALL?s 2008 Public Access to Government Information (PAGI) Award winner OMB Watch, is the model for the Office of Management and Budget?s USAspending.gov.

OpenCongress, which allows you to track bills, votes, issues, and members of Congress and share information through StumbleUpon, Facebook, and e-mail a friend. OpenCongress is a joint project of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.

PolitiFact Truth-o-Meter, a collaborative project of the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly. The Web site allows you to fact-check candidates? speeches, TV ads, and interviews.

Project Vote Smart, which publishes the biographies, voting records, and other details about all presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative candidates. It also provides information about the officials in all three branches of government and at the state and local levels.

OpenSecrets.org, which lets you follows the money in politics. The Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) launched the Web site following the 1996 elections. OpenSecrets.org was recently redesigned to allow easy searching of candidates, industries, PACs, news and analysis, and more.

This list is part of PC World?s ?100 Incredibly Useful and Interesting Web Sites,? which includes other categories such as ?9 Sites to Help You Survive the Recession? and ?7 Great Sites About Music and Literature? (which includes Portland?s Powell?s Books). You might not agree with all of the picks, but it makes for a fun and interesting read!

Source: AALL Washington Blawg

Full post as published by LexLibris on October 10, 2008 (boomark / email).