The New York Times on Thursday rolled out its latest political application program interface, just as members of the 111th Congress are settling into their new offices.
The Congress API will enable developers to keep close eye on their elected representatives with data on specific congressional roll call votes and members' most recent positions on roll call votes. The API also provides lists of House and Senate members in specific years, as well as biographical and role information about specific members.
(Credit:
The New York Times)
The tool is one of a series of APIs the Times is developing to let its readers dissect the data it uses in its reporting. In October, it released an API to track campaign donations. The newspaper also released a movie review API and is working on several more, including a Times Best Sellers tool.
The information for the Congress API comes from the House and Senate Web sites, along with the Library of Congress site Thomas.gov and is updated throughout the day while Congress is in session. The tool works with information from other publicly available data sources like the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress and GovTrack.
The biographical data for House members goes as far back as 1983, while the data for House votes goes back to 1991. Developers can find information for Senate votes from as early as 1989 and information on individual Senators dating back to 1947.
Politicians are still slowly learning how to reach out to their constituents on the Internet, but that doesn't mean citizens can't keep tabs on Washington online. The latest new-media tool from The New York Times provides an embeddable widget that allows people to analyze campaign contributions made to the presidential candidates.
This graph is an example of the type of analysis possible with the New York Times' new API. Click graphic for larger version.
(Credit: New York Times)The campaign finance tool is one of the application program interfaces the Times is developing to let its readers dissect the data it uses in its reporting. The data for this API comes straight from the Federal Election Commission, though the campaigns are only required to report contributions of more than $200. As the campaigns file their last three FEC reports, the API data will be updated.
The API enables users to look at overall donation figures as well as donations broken down by state or ZIP code. Users can also search for contributors either by first name, last name, or ZIP code.
The Times promises to update the campaign financing tool, and it is working on other APIs as well, including ones for restaurant listings, congressional votes, and movie reviews.
With its tagline, "upload. share. archive.", it may have been inevitable that the magazine-sharing Web site Mygazines.com would face allegations of copyright infringement.
Mygazines, which announced its launch in late July, allows users to upload and share magazines. Digital copies of the magazines on the site are easy to read, and users can comment on them, leave ratings, and use articles to create their own "custom" magazines.
The site is free to join, and there are no advertisements, but that hasn't allayed concerns of magazine publishers.
Dawn Bridges, a spokeswoman for Time Warner's Time division, told the AP that the publisher is looking into ways to have the site shut down.
Usually, a company encouraging its users to share copyrighted material could be held accountable for infringement. In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the file-sharing site Grokster could be held liable for the copyright violations of its users, since the site took "affirmative steps to foster infringement."
There is a hitch in the case against Mygazines, however. Mygazines is registered in the Caribbean island of Anguilla and hosted in Sweden, by the notorious PRQ. The Stockholm-based PRQ is owned by the founders of BitTorrent tracker site Pirate Bay and is known for hosting other dubious sites.
With its domain name registered abroad and its servers beyond U.S. borders as well, Mygazines seems to have slipped around the jurisdiction of U.S. copyright law. Even though publishers could pursue legal action against the site for material available in the U.S., there'd be no way to get representatives for the company to court or to collect damages.
So if Time and other publishers are looking to thwart Mygazines and its more than 16,000 users, it may have to go after VeriSign, which maintains the master .com database.
Or, it could look across the Atlantic. It's not an impossible task: in February 2008, a Swedish prosecutor charged four men connected to Pirate Bay with conspiracy to violate copyright law; a week later, a Danish ISP was ordered to block Pirate Bay.
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