Credit:U.S. State Department

• The State Department's Flickr feed, while generally not rising to Souza-like levels of artistry, does offer a peek at the circus surrounding Hillary Clinton's diplomatic visit to Moscow.
• Here's Rep. Bob Latta, Republican of Ohio, in mobile app form. (Thanks Shaun Dakin)
• 150,000 people use the FCC's new app to find out more about their broadband speed.
• And the Census Bureau is answering both critics and questions on its Twitter feed.

Credit: SquareUp.com

TechCrunch reports that Square, the cell-phone based payment processor, is being used by at least two local political candidates to fundraise at events, as part of the service's beta rollout. (via Tech Republican) TechCrunch's commentators are appropriately skeptical. Aren't trend stories required by some higher power to have at least three examples? But since it's Friday, let's go ahead and indulge in a little harmless speculation about what the potential of Square might be in politics.

Having gotten a chance to play with an early version of Square, we can report that the whole process has been engineered, by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, to be as easy as possible. The user experience is simple, for sure. But perhaps more importantly for Square users, Dorsey and his team have spent considerable energy streamlining the payment collector's experience on the backend, particular when it comes to engaging with a bank and payment processor. Think about the possibility of a candidate or advocacy group, just starting out, being able to carry a Square-enabled phone door-to-door, collecting small payments.

As TechCrunch notes, though, there's something hanging up Square's usage in campaign politics, and it's something that has also proven to be a hurdle in text-message fundraising too -- the ability to collecting donor information in the way the law requires. But TC reports that team Square is working on that:

[...] Dorsey says that they are releasing Square’s API to allow fundraisers to build additional applications on top of Square, where they could input all of the necessary data. Once this is enabled, Square will allows fundraisers to eliminate paper collection and payments all together.

Organizing for America ran a full-page ad (pdf) in today's USA Today, they report, that makes use of the photos sent in through their online photo-uploader -- an interesting bit of online/offline synergy.

Fun for a Friday afternoon: Am I the only person who thinks Google Suggest is like a public Ouija board? Here's a glimpse into what the hive mind is thinking currently about our current and immediate past presidents, according to the gnomes behind Google Suggest (that is, what are the likeliest search phrases people are entering after the words "Will Barack Obama..." or "Will George Bush..."):

Others have made this point elsewhere, but it's worth pointing out again just how quickly the idea that bills should be available online for a few days before a floor vote has become conventional thinking. It seemed like as soon as the House Rules Committee posted a final version of the health care bill, all of Washington automatically calculated ahead 72 hours to the earliest possible time a floor vote could happen (which puts us on Sunday).

That doesn't have to be the case. Speaker Pelosi could call a vote whenever she wanted, at this point. That she hasn't -- and that people don't seem to have expected her to -- is probably a testament to the work done by open gov advocates (for example) to, in fairly short order, make the 72 hour rule into something of a norm.

Not to be outshone by either Organizing for America or the people who put together that "State of the Internet" video, the White House has repackaged its health-care-by-the-numbers week-long campaign into a catchy two minutes of statistics, cute graphics, and punchy music.

Credit: SupremeCourt.gov

The Supreme Court yesterday unveiled the much-needed redesign of its website at SupremeCourt.gov.

The old SupremeCourt.go

The site was once a bit of an eyesore, and difficult to use -- more appropriate for a small rural parish's website than the online home of the Supreme Court of the United States of America. Information was difficult to find, and required an intimate familiarity of the court's jargon and proceedings to make much sense of. How's the redesign? From a non-attorney's perspective, the site -- design-wise -- has been updated to about, hmm, 2002. Then again, the highest court in the land does not like to rush blinding into the future. The early aughts is perhaps the best we could have hoped for. As for functionality, it's easier now to find some of the site's key elements, but there's still plenty of work to be done. But first, here's how SCOTUS described the launch in a press release:

Visitors will find that the Supreme Court Web site has an updated and more user-friendly design. The site continues to provide online access to the Court's slip opinions, orders, oral argument transcripts, schedules, Court rules, bar admission forms, and other familiar information. But it also has several new features, including enhanced search capabilities, an interactive argument calendar, improved graphics, and additional historic information.

The blog of Legal Times finds key elements of the site's content pleasingly easier to get to now:

Several important pieces of information about the Court that used to take several clicks to get to are now brought forward, for easier access.

And Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation, which notably did a volunteer mock redesign of the Supreme Court site, notes several improvements, along with several areas where things could still be better:

• The webpage needs to provide more information about what the Court is doing, explaining legal terms of art, and grouping relevant information together (such as information pertaining to a particular case).
• It should incorporate a user-friendly advanced search engine.
• Use machine-readable formats (not just PDFs).

But, that said, the most important part of the Supreme Court website took place under the hood, as they say. For more than a decade, the Supreme Court hasn't actually had control over their own online home. They relied upon the Government Printing Office to manage the site, shipping changes GPO's way anytime they wanted anything posted or tweaked. A handful of Supreme Court justices trekked to Capitol Hill recently to ask for appropriated money for an in-house site. They got it. Now, going forward, the staff of the United States Supreme Court will actually run the website of the United States Supreme Court. That should make things easier, and suggests that this week's redesign was just the start.

Update: Alex Howard does an in-depth review of the new Supreme Court website -- and notes that the new site breaks a number of old links.

• UK | The Conservative Technology Manifesto - and the importance of skunkworks
  The Conservative Party recently launched the Conservative Technology Manifesto "to make the British government the most technology friendly in the world" (Rishi Saha talked about the Conservative party strategy at PDF Europe): increasing broadband speed, improving access to government data, creating 600.000 jobs are the keypoints. Anyway the document is ambitious and it seems to have one very innovative commitment: creating "a small IT development team in government – a 'government skunkworks' – that can develop low cost IT applications in-house and advise on the procurement of large projects".

Credit: BarackObama.com

• Organizing for America launches a little visualizer front-end interface for their campaign to have supporters send in signs saying why they're backing health care reform.
• That Google DC event on online democracy that fell victim to the great snow-valanche of oh-ten has been rescheduled for the end of March.
• The State Department reportedly plans an internal social network.
• And FEMA launches a map that shows you in plain color the flood history of your county.

(With Micah Sifry)

Credit: State.gov/opinionspace

Last week came word that the U.S. State Department was launching a project called Opinion Space, a participatory, online experiment in mapping global public opinion. It was intriguing, exciting, engaging. It was also, how shall we say, the slightest bit inscrutable. Just what is this thing, really? So I rang up Ken Goldberg and asked him. Goldberg is a robot builder, artist, and director of the University of California at Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), the State Department's partner in the Opinion Space experiment. What follows are some quick notes on our conversation.

Goldberg traces the roots of Opinion Space back more than a decade. "We got interested in the idea of collaborative filtering in 1997," he says, referring to his group at BCNM, and the study of applying algorithms to collective decision making. It's the same technology that powers book recommendation engines, for example, explains Goldberg. Their interest sprang from a reaction against, he says, what they were witnessing in the tech world at that time. From artificial intelligence to the early online space, the models seemed all too cut and dry, predicated on a "very clean, binary world." Fast forward to the aughts. Goldberg started seeing the same miscues in the social media realm of Facebook and Twitter. "The model that is often used is that there is a binary relationship -- friends or not friends, followers or not followers. All the nuances are not being all that well captured." The result is a world of cyberpolarization, says Goldberg, citing an idea floated by Professor Cass Sunstein (now Director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein) in Republic 2.0. "You think everybody agrees with you," says Goldberg, "and you get more and more extreme."

"But the real world isn't like that," he goes on. "Everything is messy and shades of gray." The real world -- and the world of robotics. (Yes, you were promised robots.) ...