In honor of my LIS 5661 government documents class, I share with thee such splendor.

As I work on my govdoc paper, I’ll be sure to share the interesting documents, testimonials from hearings, committee reports, etc that I find.

Of course I’m curious about the financial reports, so to practice my reference skills, I checked out the sites. Most interesting, however, was my foray to the Center for Responsive Politics. One of the lead stories on their page that caught my eye was a great picture of our president-to-be (in less than 24 hours!) with the caption of “Who’s paying for his inauguration?” Check out the link – it is really, really interesting!

The article breaks down where the money comes from – which states, industries, organizations and even which individuals donated.

Please note that OpenSecrets.org is a nonpartisan guide “to money’s influence on U.S. Elections and public policy.” As someone very well aware of how easy it is to “spin” things in politics, I recommend bookmarking this site.

Update 1/24: One of my other favorite non-partisan/independent organizations, factcheck.org, answered a recent question about Obama’s inauguration costs versus George Bush’s inauguration: Did Barak Obama’s inauguration really cost four times as much as George W. Bush’s?

Updated 6/30/09

It has been widely noted how Barack Obama has utilized technology and social media to educate and inform U.S. citizens about his campaign (just check out his YouTube channel and his Facebook, Twitter, MySpace pages).  In fact, some debate whether it made a difference in helping him win the election. Now he has a new site, change.gov which has the mission to inform the public of what’s going on as he prepares to take office this Tuesday, January 20th.

It looks like more government agencies are following Obama’s lead.

Government on Twitter – a few comprehensive sites with info:

• The Government’s A-Twitter: A Comprehensive List of Government Twitter Feeds – from Alexandra Rampy, aka socialbutterfly

• The US Government Catches the Twitter Bug, And Amazingly, Does it Well – from the Eric Krangel, Silicon Insider

• GovTwit Directory – BearingPoint Blog (updated 7/20/09 – GovTwit Directory is no longer affiliated with Bearing Point)

Update 1/22: Check out Tweet Congress. Includes statistics (e.g., see who’s the most followed, who tweets/who doesn’t, who tweets the most, etc.) and a nice search function to see which Congress-folk are using Twitter:  search by name, state, party. If your favorite Congressperson isn’t on there, it has an option to sign a petition in attempt to get them tweeting!

It is interesting to see the government utilizing social media in order to inform the public. It makes total sense, but it is amazing nonetheless!

Update 6/30/09: I discovered a new site called GovFresh that incorporates ALL live U.S. Government feeds ALL in one place: Twitter, YouTube, RSS, Facebook, Flickr accounts and more. They have it all: feeds from each branch in government, different agencies, departments, state governments, the military, contractors, political parties, news and so on…