Today is National Voter Registration Day, and people browsing the Internet can expect to find a slew of ad campaigns and marketing geared towards making the vote seem more enjoyable. Trendier, even. Like the iPhone 5, but without Apple Maps.

Behind the scenes of this registration effort, there's a growing group of technologists who are building sets of tools to bring registration, and more of the nuts and bolts of civic participation, to the web — actually putting together what developers would need to wrap the vote in an Apple-like customer experience.

TurboVote, a New York City non-profit that's trying to make voter registration as easy as ordering DVDs from Netflix, announced Monday that Google is making its service part of its politics and elections portal. Read More

With the launch of a new U.S. City Data Portal housed online by the federal government, a group of the nation's largest city chief information officers are hoping that some day developers will take the records New York City keeps on restaurants and combine it with other cities' comparable data to create new applications that could be of use to both the public and people in government. Read More

Google rolled out a new service this week that enables advertisers to target their audience specifically by congressional district. The new functionality adds a level of granularity that isn't available through Facebook, ... Read More

Mobile phone users in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria can now send emails via SMS on basic mobile phones that do not have Internet access. Google has launched a free service called Gmail SMS, which allows users to send emails as text messages free of charge, and to receive them for standard local SMS charges. Read More

Forget sending your kid to summer school: Have them stay at home and learn alongside their friends how to make cool things by learning to code. Read More

Google says it continues to see cases of governments asking Google to remove political speech, which are alarming "not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect—Western democracies not typically associated with censorship." This interpretation comes alongside newly released data from July to December 2011 detailing governmental requests to remove content from its search results or websites. Read More

We're pleased to announce the following people have been named Google Fellows for Personal Democracy Forum 2012. Fifteen highly creative and talented people were selected out of a competitive pool of more than one ... Read More