Stumbled across an interesting little utility on the AFL-CIO website. The AFL-CIO is America's largest labor union (for anyone who doesn't know). The utility allows users to track congressional voting on issues of interest to the union. You can the voting record of your individual representative, your state as a block, or by piece of legislation.

They take an unfortunate stance of dubbing a vote in one way or another as "right" or "wrong", but I suppose that is the point.

UPDATE: I had a point, but was too tired last night to remember it when I wrote this (what was I doing up and readin union websites at 2am?). It seems like the AFL-CIO get their information for this utility from something like the Congressional Record and enter it into their own database. I can't say for sure, but it seems like much of the Fed info on the web is hand-cranked. It struck me that it might be useful for the fed to create their own database of bills, committee discussion, testimony, associated documents, voting records, and etc, and then allow that database to be accessed by outside sources, similar to the way Google (for example) allows developers to access their data with APIs.

It would force the fed to place their data in a more structured format, and then allow private organizations to use the information in their own applications, but with the assurance that the underlying data is from a reliable source.