With the help of Klout.com, a web service that analyzes Twitter usage and influence, I've been looking at the full list of Members of Congress using the tool, looking for potentially interesting relationships in the data. With about 125 House Members now using Twitter (roughly 2/3 Rs and 1/3 Ds), many of them on a daily basis, there's a rich data set to look at. I've uploaded Klout's rankings of the House Members to ManyEyes, so if you want to entertain yourself by finding out where your favorite congresstwitter rates, go ahead.

But I also thought it might be interesting to see if there's a relationship between how well a Member is using Twitter, or just more basic metrics like the number of followers they've accumulated or how many tweets they've posted, and the kind of district they come from. Might Twitter usage have anything to do with Members who represent safe seats vs marginal seats? In other words, if your district is heavily Democratic or Republican, might that make you a more voluble and interesting Twitterer? Using Charles Cook's "Partisan Voting Index," which assigns every congressional district a number based on how much the presidential vote in the last two elections varies from the national average, here's what I found...

Calling all developers: The Sunlight Foundation, Google, O'Reilly Media and Techweb are launching a new contest, Apps for America 2: The Data.gov Challenge, to celebrate the launch of Data.gov today.

If you follow me on Twitter, you probably noticed that I spent my lunch hour at the Open Society Institute today for a talk on "The Future of News" by Paul Steiger, the longtime managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, who is the head of ProPublica, an "independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest." It was a mostly gloomy session, framed by the news that 11,000 professional journalists have lost their jobs in the last two years, and all the bad news currently coming out of the newspaper industry. Well, instead of beating a dead horse, here are three ideas for projects that could help sustain investigative journalism however it is practiced going forward: