Text message "nysenate marriage" or "nysenate Adams" or "nysenate S427" to 41411 and get back a list of relevant bills or a short description of the bill in question right to your cell phone. It's part of the burgeoning Open NY Senate initiative, and while developer Nathan Freitas admits that the trial is proof-of-concept and will likely only appeal to the wonkiest of state government nerds, it's a demonstration of what parsed, searchable legislative data makes possible. The ultimate goal, says Freitas, is to make finding out what's happening in government "as easy as looking up sports scores." Might be useful the next time you're trying to settle a bar bet over what Albany is up to.

The Albany Times Union has an intriguing little story that might serve as an a-ha moment about the ability of pixels to transform government. For more than three decades, a little known office has worked away inside New York State government, clipping news stories with X-acto knives, photocopying the clippings and delivering the resulting "Digest of Newspaper Clippings" to (mostly Republican) members of the state legislature. The office, reports the Times Union, moved some 15,000 sheets of paper a day. The clipping service budget? Just under $2 million per annum. Well, things are about to change. Forty people within the Senate Research Service have been let go. How will elected officials and their staffs get their daily dose of news? Through the Internet, my friends, through the Internet:

As for press clippings, [Senate Democrats' spokesperson Travis] Proulx said the Democrats' newly-hired Chief Information Officer Andrew Hoppin will oversee an electronic version of the service, in which a small crew will compile stories from newspapers Web sites as well as blogs and e-mail them to Senate members, both Republican and Democrat.

On the campaign trail, Barack Obama liked to talk about the need to take a "scalpel" to the federal budget. Looks like that's not an approach shared by New York Democratic Governor David Paterson. Paterson has released an interactive "Budget Balancing Calculator" that challenges New Yorkers to bridge the state's $12.5 billion General Fund budget gap by adjusting state spending levels. But the calculator is much more a dull-edged hatchet than a scalpel.