Over on O'Reilly Radar, Carl Malamud has a chat with Federal Register director Ray Mosley and the Government Printing Office's Michael Wash, based on questions on the new Federal Register in XML that Malamud collected from the various folks on the Internet. If the nuances of SGML to XML conversion strike you as the most exciting thing in the world, than this is the chat for you.

But what's really powerful here is that this sort of conversation is happening at all. Government officials make what's really a technocratic change to an obscure government process and then go right to advocates, interested bloggers, and the public to hash over the details? Participatory government in action, folks, or at least one style of it .

Oh, and there's a bit of new news in the interview: the Federal Register will soon be available through RSS, so you can get nearly real-time feeds of the data.

Here's a nice point on the board when it comes to e-government. The Federal Register -- what you might think of as the United States government's version of "Dear Diary, here's what I did today" -- will be published from here on out in XML format, reveals Fed Reg director Ray Mosley on the White House blog. What's more, reports the Washington Post, archives of the Federal Register going back to 2000 have been converted into the structured and easily-remixable XML format, and posted to Data.gov. The new XML versions of the day's rules, regulations, presidential orders, and more isn't exactly user-friendly. Each weekday gets its own data file, and every year is bundled on Data.gov into a separate zip file. But that's where the rest of us are supposed to step in and make good use of the data, writes Mosley, who points to projects like Princeton's FedThread and GovPulse as useful third-party navigators of the Federal Register files.

If it seems funny that Mosley is using his time on the White House blog to give shout-outs to independent developers, there's a good reason for that. Free information isn't free. Well, at least, converting a couple decades of Federal Register to XML isn't free. Going back to 2000 cost $100,000 says Mosley. Going back to '94 will cost another $150,000. Justifying the devotion of resources to producing beautiful data requires people doing beautiful things with the data. And here, Mosley practically issues a challenge. "Someone could demonstrate something to us," he told the post, "and we could start the wheels rolling."

It's ask and ye shall receive XML, it seems. After years of pushing by open government advocates, it took just a "Dear Colleague" from South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint and a gang of bipartisan senators to finally spur the Senate Rules Committee to, this week, change its longstanding practice and begin publishing votes in a structured data format that makes for easy analysis, visualization, and mashing up by the public. Rules Committee chair Chuck Schumer (D-NY) perhaps saw that, with transparency on the march in Washington, this was an inexpensive, easy win. Almost immediately, the Senate began publishing a comprehensive XML list of roll call votes and details on each bill's vote, also in XML...