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.

We were curious about just who it was who attended last weekend's Government 2.0 Camp in Washington DC. Who has enough interest in good government to spend their free time brainstorming about the next generation of civic participation? Was this a gathering of, as our new contributing blogger Sheila Campbell recently put it, "we-want-to-reform-government" folks? Was this a meet-up of people toiling away inside government? It's a critical question as Gov 2.0 goes from niche interest to what may turn out to be a significant movement. So we poured the published RSVP list into Many Eyes, IBM's rather remarkable free visualization engine. What spit out the other end is above. Go ahead and click around. Some of the more immediate observations: this was a meeting of both reform government and inside government folks, with a smattering of advocacy, media, and academic people as well. And the Department of Defense had enough people on the scene to take over more than a few lunch tables.

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.)