Steve Nelson of Clear Ink has produced a cool build in Second Life that displays information about Congress, pulling data into the metaverse using Sunlight Labs' API. The project is an entry in the Sunlight Foundation's "Mashup Congress and Win" contest that offers a $2,000 prize for "the best 'Web 2.0 Mashup' that displays information about Congress." (PdF's Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry are tech advisors for the Sunlight Foundation). 

I've been completely enraptured by Google Earth for about the last day or so. What Google Earth has done to so grab my attention is to partner with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Museum's Genocide Prevention Mapping Initiative. The idea is to document and display the effects of mass atrocities in their early stages:

Beginning with Darfur, we are building an interactive "global crisis map" that will provide citizens, aid workers and foreign policy professionals with a new tool to share and understand information quickly, to "see the situation", enabling more effective prevention and response.

A MySpace poll of their users claims that young people are perhaps more politically engaged than older generations; WaPo profiles John McCain, makes another tag cloud; the Slashdot community interviews Garrett Graff, chaos ensues; notes from the annals of e-democracy; results from the first National Presidential Caucus; the National Journal's Technology is closing up shop; a new Politico column from Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry looks at the Republicans and tech; and a new site from Bill Richardson might be the gloomiest thing ever.

Rounding up last night's results, explanations, and prognostications; what's CNN? Online politicos tracked the action with Twitter, Google Maps, Flickr, and YouTube instead; Hillary is favored by Microsoft employees, Barack by Google: Hillsoft vs. Goobama?; Voices without Votes gives us international impressions of the race; what do we see when we take a closer look at John McCain?; and online advertising is stuck in the dark ages.

We're at the Politics Online conference, being busy and belated getting the digest done. But it's done! Google continues to map the primary results; are the Clinton and Obama "red telephone" ads really the "first breakout hits of the YouTube campaign"?; more on Obama as Apple; those conference mp3's are on their way to your inbox; Obama is dominating our Hitwise charts; Brave New Films' anti-McCain videos are getting big; Hillaryis44 creator uncovered, five people rejoice; Obama's campaign boasts of 1.5 million calls to today's primary states.

Semi-pro campaign journalism gets a mid-term review; Republican consultant launches NoJohn.com; Chuck DeFeo shares his secrets for getting attention online; Obama gets naked with his earmarks, will Clinton follow?; and now you can listen in too on those campaign conference calls.

I'm at the National Press Club for the launch of Stanford Prof. Larry Lessig's new project, Change-Congress.org. He's here as part of Sunshine Week, and his speech is co-sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation (which I consult for) as well as the Omidyar Network. As you may know, last year, Lessig decided to shift his focus from the fight for free culture to the fight for a clean government. Here are my notes on his talk, paraphrasing as best as I can...

Confronted by the prospect of internet-driven public participation in crafting legislation, the past head of the American League of Lobbyists says, "What's next? Are we going to let the American people decide our defense policy, our trade policy, our immigration policy?"

Is the Internet good for democracy, or not? John Palfrey is up leading a distributed conversation on that topic for the second plenary session. I'm going to take notes on the conversation, but as always treat these as paraphrases at best.