Facebook has given us an unprecedented look inside the demographic breakdowns of its user base. For the first time, there's a model for quantifying who the early adopters on the Web are, and how they vote.

Read this post for the full data.

There just aren't that many of them.

But there are plenty more interested in the Bible, Country music, Sportscenter, watching 24, and playing Halo 3 on their Xbox.

Meanwhile, liberals watch the Daily Show, love Radiohead (by a 6-to-1 margin over conservatives), and (speaking as a Republican) let's just say I like who Stephen Colbert takes votes from.

This is all part of my deep dive into Facebook demographic data provided at by the Flyers Pro advertising engine. I've just updated the spreadsheet. The data looks like this...

DemocracyInAction and Catalist have just made a remarkable new deal.

Let me back up. DIA is one of the core components of the progressive political infrastructure, providing online advocacy tools to a wide range of left-leaning non-profits. And Catalist is the political data giant that grew out of the Clinton camp's upset over how the DNC was keeping up with the GOP on the tech and data front. More on that here. The deal? DIA's clients get free access to Catalist's world-class data. In exchange, they must turn over to Catalist the details on their own donors.

This is the 2008 Dopplr report for Barack Obama. The travel tracking site is sending out custom reports to all users, but is rather cleverly promoting one for the President-elect. It's probably a safe bet that few folks got around like Obama last year, what with his countless jaunts to Iowa and Hawaii and Iowa and Kenya and Iowa and Kabul and, well, Iowa. Obama's 248 separate trips and 234 days on the road, the report notes, left a carbon footprint equivalent to that of 4.2 Hummers. (And, no, Obama's not actually a Dopplr user. The company compiled trip records from press reports.)

• Not to be cowed by Organizing for America's 13-million-member or so mailing list, John McCain stepped into the fray yesterday with an email to his list on the stimulus package before Congress...
• We may never know what role, if any, the Tom Daschle YouTube video that burned up the Intertubes yesterday had in his withdrawal as HHS nominee. But woowee, it couldn't have helped...
• With Daschle out of the running, there's a been a renewed push in what is perhaps best called the progressive blogosphere to install former DNC chair Howard Dean at the helm of Health and Human Services...
• Recovery.gov, the much-anticipated oversight site tracking the payouts from the $900 billion stimulus package currently before Congress, has been dropped from the Senate version of the bill, Is it time to start worrying?...
• And even more.

Take a gander at what might grandly be called some synergy between open-minded government and forward-thinking journalism. The New York Times' Hannah Fairfield and Graham Roberts have put together an interactive graphic powered by Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Department data, mapping the disparity of what American men and women are paid for the same jobs. Jobs above the bold black line pay women better. Those jobs below put more cash in men's pockets. (The Times is careful to note that discrimination isn't the only possible cause for the wage gap.) Clicking on a job category isolates those jobs, and clicking on a job digs deeper into the data. Fairfield and Roberts also annotate the chart at various points to draw journalistic conclusions from the detailed data BLS and Census make available.

Development Seed's Ian Cairnes has good rundown over at the Center for American Progress' Science Progress about what good government data empowers citizens to create, using DC's Apps for Democracy contest as a case study. Well worth a read.

There's a related wrinkle when it comes to the promise and potential of mashing up government data on the city, state, and federal level. If Recovery.gov succeeds, it seems, it will be example number one for open government advocates as they make the case that good data can actually improve governance -- and boost Americans' faith in government. In that case, we have OMB and the eventual CTO setting standards on how data must (with the full backing of the federal government) be structured. There was no quicker way to kill a conversation at Transparency Camp last weekend than to wonder aloud how data standards for municipal data sharing should be established. If we learned anything from The Wire, it's that there's real power in defining how data is defined and collected. One suggestion heard at Transparency Camp: early adopters, like the DC city government, should lay down data patterns and then try to sell other cities on them.

The New York Times' Brian Knowlton's got a good recap of a conference call with new U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra, and Kundra lets it be know that he'll be establishing a Data.gov site "that will put vast amounts of government information into the public domain." (Me think Knowlton's using "public domain" in the colloquial and not legal sense.) With the proliferation of new administration stand-alone sites -- Recovery.gov, Financial Stability.gov, AStrongMiddleClass.gov -- we're going to need Domains.gov to keep them all straight.

[UPDATE] See? Every time you turn around, pop!, a new domain. This afternoon's: HealthReform.gov.

Nestled in the gargantuan omnibus appropriations bill currently cooling its heals before Congress is a snippet of language that may be of interest. What the provision, inserted by Silicon Valley Democrat Mike Honda, would do is start the process of pushing out federal legislative records in bulk, directly to the public. Wired's Kim Vitter has details on Honda's provision. The raison d'être of the Library of Congress' THOMAS system, as you likely know, is to make legislative documents accessible, from bill texts to Congressional Research Service summaries to co-sponsor lists to status updates. THOMAS was cutting edge when it was introduced. Of course, that was back when Bill Clinton was waxing futuristic about bridges to the 21st century. Today, it's showing its age. Working with THOMAS can be an exercise in frustration. The lack of persistent URLS, for example, means that individual documents can be difficult to link to directly. And THOMAS isn't great at engaging the public on the colloquial level it has towards legislation. (Try search THOMAS for "stimulus.") THOMAS today is a pretty good database with a lagging user interface attached.

User-friendly sites like OpenCongress (which, hey and by the way, has just released a bunch of new features, including a wiki) have stepped in to fill the breach, but they work by scraping THOMAS. Honda's office is looking for help determining the best method for pushing out bulk legislative data, whether that's an API or, Honda's online director Rob Pierson tells Wired, "some sort of bulk-data download." Share your thoughts here or in Wired's comments, and Honda's office is sure to see them.

A few days back, Larry Lessig floated the idea that Congressman John Conyers's backing of a certain copyright bill could be explained away by campaign contributions the Michigan Democrat took in from publishers. Lessig tried to soften the charge with the caveat "no one can know what goes on the heart or mind of Congressman Conyers." Accusing someone of "shilling for Big Paper," though, tends to leave a certain taste in the mouth. Not surprisingly, Conyers is not at all pleased. The determinative connection that Lessig drew from MAPLight fundraising data and his legislative actions "crosses the line," he writes. I'll argue below that we're bearing witness here to a timely and important moment. But first, the wrath of Conyers...