Yesterday I held a session called Semantic Web II: Civic Hacking, the Semantic Web, and Visualization at Transparency Camp. In addition to posting my slides, here’s basically what I said during the talk (or, now on reflection, what I should have said): Who I Am: I run the site GovTrack.us whic...

Andy Warhol famously said, “In the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.� In the age of the Internet, a TV rant can give birth to a “new revolution.� A new Rasmussen poll found that 54 percent of Americans “say no bailouts period.� Conservatives are tapping into that anger...

Michael Heath, Maine's most prominent anti-gay activist, recently gave a speech addressing the reasons why the Pine Tree State should not allow marriage equality. Now, we want to be nice, so we will just say: It's an offensive load of disingenuous anti-gay cockapoopy, the likes of which shouldn't be...

Media baron Rupert Murdoch is in a fight that he had hoped to avoid. In a statement, Murdoch apologized: We ran a cartoon that offended many people. Today I want to personally apologize to any reader who felt offended, and even insulted. Over the past couple of days, I have spoken to a number of peo...

They say it takes a village to raise a child. Well, it also takes a village — at best a supportive community, and at the least a few very good friends — to keep a person sane and happy. All of us need companionship, which is exactly why teenagers are texting their friends in the middle o...

As we were shooting these photos of the wretched conditions at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Third Street a little African-American boy stopped and asked us, “Mister. Do you know what is going to go here?” We answered, “It’s supposed to be a Starbucks.” This child, wh...

This is really cool - new Federal spending, according to the recent stimulus bill, will need to be exposed through an RSS feed. This means, in theory, that as new spending is approved, we can all receive notification in our blogs… or better yet, since these updates will contain structured data...

  "Sex, Dreams, & Self Control"  Muncie Civic Theatre  March 20-21.  8:30 pm MUNCIE, IN - Ball State Alumni Kevin Thornton will bring his original one man show to Muncie Civic Theatre.  Thornton graduated from the Department of Theatre and Dance in 2001. His sh...

What does a post-Valentine's Day rejection of same-sex love look like? Well if thrown by the Maine Family Policy Council (the new name for the suddenly-more-mainstream, suddenly-more-Focus on the Family-affiliated Christian Civic League of Maine ), that event looks something like this: 2009 Marriage...

I’ve been acquainted with this quote for quite a few years, now, but following the events surrounding the first several weeks of the Obama administration and his allies in Congress, culminating in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, for the first time I truly understand what th...