Sunday, July 13, 2008

Something cool to waste your time on

Campaign finance disclosure laws require that anyone making donations of $100 or more must make their name and donation history a matter of public record.
This website lets you track campaign donors via these records. You can search by you neighborhood, you can see who celebrities and companies are donating to, and you can even check up on your friends (a little disturbing but also extremely interesting). I’ve added the widget below or you can go to the website.



This is a somewhat frightening example of the power that comes from combining the internet with freedom of information acts.

Also I’m a confessed ‘mapophile.’ I’m just fascinated by maps. There is this website with some cool interactive maps that show historic trends and wars here’s the one for the spread of religions.

2 comments:

betsey said...

Another place that does something similar is Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org). I interned for them after I graduated from undergrad (so I like them better than fundrace :)...). They recently reformatted their website, but they have a lot of great data from past cycles and did some analysis of giving as well.

SGarff said...

You’re right. It is even better than Fundrace. Thanks for the tip.