Down in DC a few weeks ago, a friend of mine had the gall to say, "you know, you're not only a politics geek, you're a real geek geek." The nerve of the guy. This post isn't going to lessen my geek rep one iota, but whatever. What I have to report is pure awesome and I don't care who knows it. This morning, I was reading the Sunlight Foundation's Lab's director's Clay Johnson's blog post about what's next for the Labs, and a throwaway mention gave me that prickly sense down the back of my neck that I get when I know I've stumbled across something powerfully good: innovations in naming standardizations that will streamline fundraising reports, regulatory records, and more. Gadzooks! Does it get more exciting?

Obama has been making big news today for calling for something rather geeky: interoperability between the Defense Department's electronic health records system and the Department of Veterans Affairs' much praised VistA digital records program. A soldier, the thinking goes, shouldn't experience any gap in care or coverage when he or she is transitioning between active duty and veteran's status. Of course, Obama has made a big deal about the potential of electronic health records (EHRs) to improve the America health care system. And a successful DOD-VA EHR bridge would be quite a lovely case study to bolster his approach.

Borrowing a page from Facebook, Andrew Odewahn put together a fun charting of the United State Senate's social graph going back to the 102nd Congress in 1991. "Friendship" here really means voting record affinity. Members are shown to share a connection if they voting together more than 65% percent of the time, and their proximity to one another is based on the level of agreement above and beyond that level. As Odewahn notes, one of the more interesting aspects is the clusters that develop within Republican and Democratic caucuses.

(A plug: Odewahn used GovTrack's scraped data to build his chart -- data that will be much easier to get now that the Senate has adopted XML for votes.)

Neat stuff. You know what I'd also love to see? Any actual social graph of the Senate showing who's attending whose weekend BBQ, playing squash together, and the like. As we've seen, who sits next to each other on Amtrak can be predictive of the very future of the Senate.

NextGov's Aliya Sternstein has really been doing some tremendous reporting about the nitty-gritty of the DC tech and policy scene. In her latest report, Sternstein tells of a rather airy Senate confirmation hearing for incoming U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra. Chopra, who will head up the White House's portfolio on using technology to drive American innovation in the years ahead got one -- one -- substantive question on what he plans to do once in office. How might telemedicine benefit us?, asked Minnesota's Amy Klobuchar. It will create jobs and lower the cost of health care, answered Chopra.

Good enough!

No questions for Chopra, reports Sternstein, about the more contentious aspects of tech policy implementation. Not a question on topics like the electric grid or patent reform or electronic health records -- the last of which was earmarked in the stimulus package for $20 billion in federal spending. (The Wall Street Journal's Amy Schatz backs up Sternstein's account of the breezy hearing.)

Sternstein: "The ambivalence signals, perhaps, a misunderstanding of the position or, worse, indifference about the role."

Throughout the past several months of the health reform debate, the theme that significant health reform can't wait has been one of the most consistent themes in the approach of President Obama and other strong advocates for reform. As things have played out, advocates are coming to terms with the political and logistic reality that the House and Senate won't vote on a health reform legislative package until after the August recess. That said, Organizing for America, the field arm of the Democratic National Committee is keeping up the pressure on near-term reform. And they're doing it where some Senators seem to be spending a fair amount of time these days: Twitter. Type in your zip code on the Organizing for America site, and OFA's new Tweet Your Senator applet posts to your account one of a handful of pre-written short messages on the need for speedy reform, addressed to your senator, like "To @SenatorMenendez: Affordable, quality health insurance can't wait http://bit.ly/12Gtt3 #hc09 #NJ #07463."

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."

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.

Maybe Oregon Democratic Senator Jeff Merkely thought solving a Rubik's cube in a YouTube video was the best way to demonstrate that overhauling the American health care system was difficult, but not impossible. Maybe. The better bet is that he saw an opportunity to redeem all the long hours he's put into pulling off this feat.

The Massachusetts Senate seat up for grabs in next week's suddenly very exciting special election has leading Republicans gearing up their online operations on behalf of Republican candidate Scott Brown, who is challenging Democrat Martha Coakley for the seat left vacant by the death of Ted Kennedy; we've seen Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty hit his email list on behalf of Brown, as has former Bay State governor Mitt Romney.

Leading Republican operatives also seem to be looking to turn the race, which could take away the 60th Senate vote Democrats very much want to protect, into a demonstration of their rising ability to shape major races -- and the Republican Party -- by harnessing online enthusiasm and dollars on behalf of their chosen candidates. "If we can do this now," tweeted techPresident contributor Patrick Ruffini at the tail end of yesterday's Brown money bomb, "imagine what we'll do for Marco."

Marco is, of course, Marco Rubio, the underdog candidate who seems to be mounting a surprisingly strong challenge for Florida's Senate seat against Florida Governor Charlie Christ. Here's some useful background from the New York Times magazine on how Rubio is emerging as something of the embodiment of the tea party movement, or at least a disapproval with what are seen as moderate, capitulating Republicans. The "this" Ruffini refers to doing is the more than $1.3 million that the Brown campaign is saying it raised through an online "money bomb" in one 24 hour period from, reports the Boston Herald, 16,800 people at an average contribution of $78 a pop.

As to the mechanics of pulling off his "money bomb," Brown rolled out a custom version of iContribute, the software developed by Engage, the DC-area firm led by Ruffini and partner Mindy Finn who happen to be the pair behind the Rebuild the Party drive launched in 2008 as a challenge to the Republican party's old guard. One way to "rebuild the party" in your image and likeness: equip your favored candidates with tools that help them amass the resources they need to get into office. The iContribute software is the same contribution tool that now-Virginia Governor-elect Bob McDonnell used in his campaign, but in Brown's case, the backend had an added visual hook. His "Red Invades Blue" campaign boasted a map of the state of Massachusetts, slowly turning red as money was raised yesterday, from western Mass to the coastal east. By the end of the day yesterday, Nantucket was blazing crimson.

CQ Politics is reporting that the DSCC has just made a half million dollar ad buy in Massachusetts on behalf of Coakley.

As we reach the very end of the Massachusetts special election, we're seeing a ramping up of folks working to extract what the race means for the state of online politics. The New York Times' Ross Douthat, for example, takes Republican Scott Brown's strong Internet showing -- three times the number of Twitter followers as his opponent, Democrat Martha Coakley, for example, or the $1.3 Brown's campaign says it raised in a one-day online fundraising blitz -- as a sign that Republicans and conservatives have erased whatever dominance Democrats and progressives once had online. Maybe the Internet doesn't favor liberals, doesn't favor progressivism, the thinking goes -- assumptions that you fairly regularly hear at conferences where people gather to discuss online politics.

(Keep reading for a recap of some of the Internet highlights from the Massachusetts special election.)

And yes, the Brown vs. Coakley race, as well as, for example, the skilled way in which British conservatives are making use of technology, suggests that the idea that the Internet favors the left needs to be thought about far more carefully. But Douthat makes a bit of a leap to say that the lesson from today's election in Massachusetts is that, in fact, "technology changes, but politics remains the same." It's worth waiting until the dust settles in the Bay State before we take any hard and firm conclusions from the experience, but there seems to be a good chance that the Internet actually changed "politics" a great deal here.

(Recap coming soon, promise...)

The very fact that we're talking about the real chance that tomorrow there will be a "Senator Scott Brown," though, says that something has changed here. Coakley expected to waltz to the Senate seat (and, of course, it's silly to overlook the weakness of her candidacy when we draw any lessons from this campaign). The Internet seems to have equipped Brown to catch, collect, and amplify the enthusiasm that grew around his campaign -- both pro-Brown energy, and anti-Coakley, anti-Obama, anti-health care reform (and anti-Republican establishment) sentiment. And then there's the simple logistic factor that, because this was a special election triggered by the death of Ted Kennedy, this was a condensed campaign schedule. That's probably a major deal here because if there is the anything the Internet seems to be good at, it seems to be catalyzing excitement at an amazingly quick pace. The Internet has suggested again and again that it loves an insurgent candidate (Howard Dean, Ron Paul, Barack Obama...) , and Brown's surge seemed in many ways to be a perfect match for the Internet's particular metabolism.

But that's a long lead-in to a quick recap of assorted highlights on the new media front on the MA special election race, which might be particularly helpful if you haven't been keeping close tabs on the online action...