Energy information software company Opower has partnered with Facebook and the Natural Resources Defense Council to release a new social web application that allows customers of 16 U.S. energy utilities to compare how their energy usage and attempts to save energy with their Facebook friends.

This introduces a competitive element — allowing users to compare their power usage stacks up against those of their friends, the typical American or the most energy-efficient homeowners in the U.S. — in the hopes of turning the electricity bill from a monthly chore into a topic of conversation.

The UK government has commissioned an independent Data Strategy Board to guide and accelerate future government data releases. The board is tasked with not only determining what data should be released, but will work ... Read More

The White House today announced Ethics.gov, a portal the Obama administration is using to consolidate several sets of data related to elections or influence all in one place. This takes several datasets that were previously more difficult to get to and makes them more accessible and easier to use. Firstly, people who may not have known about these data now do, and have a chance to see what each dataset includes. The Sunlight Foundation's John Wonderlich writes, "... the President is acknowledging the role of public oversight, and asserting that the President has a responsibility to create meaningful online disclosure of ethics and influence information. That's a new role for the President, and one we're glad to see the White House struggling through, especially because it's a role Sunlight has tried to play as much as possible." Read More

In a paper published earlier this week, Harlan Yu and David G. Robinson assert that the phrase "open government," which used to mean government transparency — as in, revealing the internal functions and decision-making of government — has come to also mean increasing access to data that may not have anything to do at all with transparency. Read More

As expected, the New York City Council on Wednesday voted unanimously to approve a landmark piece of legislation that would require its 50 plus agencies to publish their quantitive data sets through an online portal in a machine-readable format, enabling public and private sector access to better manipulate and interpret the city's information. The bill as passed was crafted with the cooperation of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration and it's expected that the mayor will sign the legislation into law. Read More

Using the Sunlight Foundation's* Capitol Words API, independent analytics consultant Dan Kozikowski has put together a look at the vocabulary of each member of Congress and mapped the results on a Google map.

By his analysis, the most loquacious legislator in the House of Representatives is Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, who holds a bachelor's degree from Yale and a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law.

Kozikowski also looked for words said only once in Congress by members of each party since 1996, which is as far back as the data available through Sunlight goes. (Sunlight gets its data from the Congressional Record.)

The Associated Press' Kelli Kennedy reports that an expensive and newfangled computer system designed to prevent fraudulent Medicare payments has yielded disappointing results.

The congressionally mandated, $77 million system was built by Northrum Grumman and a group of other companies, Kennedy reports, and has yielded a savings of $7,591 so far after flagging 2,500 leads and 600 suspicious cases.