The New York State Senate's new Open Legislation portal launched this morning, meant as an upgrade to this. Among the new features on this beta version of Open Legislation: the dead-simple Google-like search interface you see above, and, thanks to the advent of permalinks, the ability for Google to actually crawl and serve up the site. Beyond that, the new portal has an assortment of options for tracking and pulling structured legislative information, either via API or data feed (XML, CSV, and JSON). What's more, there's built in commenting, so you can make your opinion known. Down the road, says state senate CIO Andrew Hoppin, the site will grow to be a tool for preemptive disclosure, as a home for documents and materials previously available only through Freedom of Information Law requests.

Give it a test drive.

Text message "nysenate marriage" or "nysenate Adams" or "nysenate S427" to 41411 and get back a list of relevant bills or a short description of the bill in question right to your cell phone. It's part of the burgeoning Open NY Senate initiative, and while developer Nathan Freitas admits that the trial is proof-of-concept and will likely only appeal to the wonkiest of state government nerds, it's a demonstration of what parsed, searchable legislative data makes possible. The ultimate goal, says Freitas, is to make finding out what's happening in government "as easy as looking up sports scores." Might be useful the next time you're trying to settle a bar bet over what Albany is up to.

You'd be forgiven if you're a non-New Yorker and you find what's been happening in the New York State Senate this week confusing. Even from close up, it's super confusing. Who, exactly, is running the place? Unclear. The recently-revamped State Senate website still lists Democrat Malcolm Smith as Senate Majority Leader, while the courts are today wrestling with who is actually in control up there in Albany.

There's one place, though, where clarity reigns: Wikipedia. The entry for Majority Leader of the New York State Senate reads: "The current Majority Leader is Dean Skelos, who replaced Malcolm Smith on June 8, 2009, when Democrats Hiram Monserrate and Pedro Espada, Jr., joined the 30 Republican members of the State Senate to change the leadership." That line was changed by user "Co096392" at 8:50pm, June 8th, just after the struggle over power went down -- and hasn't been touched since.