A project of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation, OpenCongress is a site that anyone even remotely interested in politics should see.

OpenCongress makes it easy to track particular bills, topics and congresspeople by RSS, a tracking page or an embeddable widget (see below, for example). A personal account can be created easily with OpenID, there's a perfect amount of AJAX making the site a joy to navigate and all kinds of outside news and data is pulled into the site, rated by users and actively discussed.

The widget above, about a particular bill in congress, is just one of many widgets you can choose from.

I don't usually pay much attention to politics, but within five minutes I built and subscribed to an RSS feed displaying the most recent votes of congresspeople from my area, news stories and blog posts about them and news about a few bills of particular interest to me.

I voted in favor of one bill myself and left a comment on the site about it. There were already a couple of other comments on the same bill and though most of them were worthless - I could hide those ones by turning up the rating criteria on a slider!

This is a really well put-together site that makes me want to pay attention to politics because the user experience is so smooth and compelling.

continued below

Dream Features

What more could OpenCongress offer? There's so much there it's impossible not to ask for more - it really feels like the people behind the site might deliver it! I'd love to see live embedded video of discussions about bills of interest to me and IM alerts when those discussions are about to happen.

Right now the site uses Technorati to bring in blog posts about any bill you're looking at and then users click back to the site to rate the posts they've read. It would be nice to see some AideRSS integration so that we could subscribe to just the most commented on and linked-to posts in that feed.

Finally, I'd like to be able to configure what gets delivered in the feed I subscribe to; an option to opt-out of certain information sources like news stories would probably work best.

More fun with Congress

See also this cute little widget the Sunlight Foundation launched yesterday, displaying the most used word of the day on the floor of congress. Very interesting! A tag cloud is in the works and at that point it will prove of more actual use. Congress - it's not just for stuffy people any more!

Unfortunately all this information is displayed quite simply; there is as of yet no deep personalization as in Sunlight's years-old and fabulous OpenCongress project, there's no search and the app doesn't make use of the iPhone's push capabilities. It's not a bad start, but there is a lot of potential for an iPhone app to make Congressional activity a much more engaging part of peoples' day-to-day lives.

Many Senators and Representatives already have their own YouTube channels, and these two new sites aggregate the content from these. Over time, we hope to see more elected officials on YouTube, though we also hope to see more than just clips from local TV news shows.

One trend we noticed on a lot of these pages, however, was that quite a few Senators and Representatives decided not to allow comments on their videos. We would hope that more of our elected officials would value comments from their constituents.

Senate and House in HD

We do, however, commend Congress for using YouTube's new HD capabilities (even though some of the material in the intro video looks like it was shot with substandard cameras).

House vs. Househub

On a lighter note, the announcement on YouTube's blog links to this page, instead of the new page for the U.S. House of Representatives. You decide which one you find more interesting.

OpenCongress

If you don't want video, but hard facts about Congress, we recommend OpenCongress, which aggregates information about the details of business on Capitol Hills.

At the start of what could be the most open US Presidential administrations in decades, the Sunlight Foundation's work should be more potent, interesting and useful in fostering accountability than ever before.

After eight years of Bush era secrecy, an Obama era Sunlight should have far more fodder to work with. The group's work should be just as important as ever; the new administration is just as in need of accountability around things like corporate influence and human rights policies as any other before it.

The Omidyar Network has a long history of funding experimental new projects on the web, from nonprofit grants like this one for Sunlight to investments in ground-breaking private companies like Digg, Seesmic, Wikia and Linden Labs.

Today's is the third round of funding Omidyar has provided Sunlight, bringing the Foundation's total support for the group to $8 million.

The idea of "open government" got a boost last week with the launch of OpenGovernment.org, a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. Similar to sibling project OpenCongress, which launched in 2008, OpenGovernment makes it simple for the average citizen to see inside the workings of their local and state governments.

Curious what bills are in the pipeline? Or what money is being spent where? OpenGovernment lays it all out in a clear and concise format that could help to create a more informed and participatory citizenry. Not only does OpenGovernment make it all accessible, it makes it interactive too.

With the beta launch, it will be opening up the local, city and state level governments to citizens' eyes in California, Louisiana, Maryland, Texas and Wisconsin. According to the launch announcement, the project will pull together "official announcements, news coverage, blog posts, social media alerts and more to give a truly illustrative picture of local government." Beyond third-party content like blog posts, the site also links directly to the full text of bills, legislators' voting records and spending data culled from FollowTheMoney.org.

OpenGovernment doesn't simply make it easy to access and understand government data, it makes it easy for users to interact around it. Users can gather around an individual bill and discuss the bill in comments. The site even offers RSS feeds for individual bills, so you can keep up with when actions are taken regarding that particular item.

Click for full image.

The announcement notes that "This is indeed a beta version of the site, so keep in mind that we expect there to be a few kinks, and much more data & features are forthcoming." So far, so good, we have to say.

If you're one who likes to keep informed on matters of the public interest, definitely consider giving OpenGovernment a perusal.

These are our favorites, we'd love to hear your suggestions as well.

It's not explicitly political but the Boston Globe's Big Picture website is a must-see collection of big photos of important events from around the world. Collections like Observing Ramadan, Scenes from the Gaza Strip and China's Lantern Festival are great for grasping what's going on in other places a little better, almost on an emotional level. Who doesn't like really big, high quality photos?

OpenCongress

The Sunlight Foundation is dedicated to casting light on the otherwise dark operations of government and one of the ways they do so is by creating really accessible political websites. OpenCongress is their best work, it's an easy-to-use site to keep track of what's being debated in Congress. Drop by for a quick glance at what the hot topics of the day are and what different sides of the debate have to say, or dive deep into the system to set up tracking feeds for your favorite politicians, legislation or issue. We reviewed OpenCongress in depth here this summer.

Obama on iTunes and YouTube

You use your computer a lot more than you listen to AM radio, we'd guess, and it's now easier than ever to keep an eye on the President thanks to the White House's video podcast feeds and YouTube channel. We thought this was pretty remarkable when it was first announced and we still think so today.

NPR Podcast Creator and Mobile Site

Want to catch an occasional short news piece about your home state or pet issue? Check out the handy new NPR podcast creation tool. We reviewed this in December when it launched and continue to be really impressed. Just enter keywords and you'll be given a custom RSS feed to subscribe to podcast news stories that contain those words. It's fast, free, easy and helpful.

Check out the very nice NPR mobile site, too. That's a great way to call in and get a few minutes of info about what's going on in the world. Have a little time while walking someplace? We like to take that opportunity to grab a few moments of learning.

Memeorandum Colors

So this one's a touch sophisticated but we just couldn't help but mention it. We presume readers here know about Techmeme, the best place to find the hottest conversations about technology on the internet. We hope you also know about the sister site Memeorandum, which aggregates hot political conversations.

That's a fun site but it's much more useful if you've got the Memeorandum Colors Greasemonkey Script installed. Take five minutes and install it, you'll be glad you did, it does not require any technical skill at all. The service uses data mining of historical linking patterns to color code the links on Memeorandum by political leanings. It's really nice to see a cluster of blog posts about a topic and be able to pick out the one conservative perspective, or one liberal one and one conservative one.

Honorable Mentions

A handful of other resources we'd also recommend you check out include:

10 Facts Every Westerner Should Know About the Middle East is simply a blog post by an atheist semantic web fan and IT security guy named Daniel Miessler. It's a good read, we like to pass it around.

LittleSis is an awesome collaborative research site that describes itself as "an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited and maintained by people like you." It's a lot of fun to browse around and could prove useful for political blogging.

Global Voices Online is a long running site that brings together bloggers from around the world. Political holidays should not be marked in isolation, it's an international world.

BreakingNewsOn is a Twitter account that finds and publishes the most "breaking news" you're likely to find anywhere. It's a really neat little project, though with a very strange background story. According to a write up on TechCrunch, founder Michael van Poppel launched the project when he just happened to get his hands on an unpublished videotape of Osama Bin Laden which he subsequently sold to Reuters. So remember kids, if you happen to find any such materials, don't forget to see if you can parlay it into a news discovery project on Twitter too. Odd, isn't it?

So those are some of our favorite sites to grab a quick bit of politics. What are yours?

WhoRunsGov.com is the Post's new site where readers can learn background information about the new Obama administration, members of congress, prominent military officials and others who now "run government."

Old Media, New Guts?

WhoRunsGov is built on a Mindtouch Dekiwiki, the same sophisticated platform used by many other organizations to assemble data-centric application sites built largely on mashups. We've seen some awesome work done by IBM with a Dekiwiki for example, pulling in data using Dapper and mashing it up with maps APIs.

WhoRunsGov, on the other hand, looks mostly like a content site right now. A mix of political news and a would-be search engine magnet in the form of 240 pages about high profile political figures. The site is a moderated wiki, it includes blogs and it aggregates relevant news coverage from the Post and around the web. That's cool, but it sure could be cooler.

Earlier this month the Post hired political blogging star Greg Sargent away from Talking Points Memo to write the lead blog on WhoRunsGov. Sargent's posts should be good and popular, but we'd love to see them augmented with content based in a paradigm fresher than the old broadcast media. There's a lot of third party data that could be pulled in to WhoRunsGov and there's outbound APIs that could make it a much more valuable site, ultimately increasing its draw and traffic.

Five Projects Doing It Better

What would that look like? For some inspiring examples, check out Little Sis, described as "an involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited & maintained by people like you." If you remember the Flash visualization theyrule.net, Little Sis is of the same vein, but a living site.

Little Sis is getting a lot of love from the Sunlight Foundation and its grand slam site OpenCongress.

The UK Guardian is doing a lot of things in this direction, most notably their initiative Free Our Data, where they are agitating for release of public data for the purpose of mashups. That's pretty hot.

The New York Times has released multiple APIs and just announced a conference called Times Open, "for developers interested in working with NYTimes.com as a news and information platform." (Disclosure: the NYTimes is a syndication partner of this site.)

The coolest political tech initiative we've seen in a long time is Memeorandum Colors, a Greasemonkey script on top of some really innovative data mining to determine the political leanings of blogs participating in the hottest online discussions each day.

Compared to those kinds of initiatives, WhoRunsGov looks a bit boring so far. There's a lot of potential though, and we hope to see the Washington Post's new initiative develop with more impact than it had when it came out of the gate.

As you can see from the images below, there are some shortcomings to the system. It only parses single words (hate is presumably connected to crime, for example) and you can't click on those words to see the context they were used in. For a much more full-featured service regarding congress, see our coverage of the Sunlight Foundation's fantastic site OpenCongress. See also Sunlight's lab project, Capitol Tweets (embedded, right), which consultant to the Foundation Nancy Watzman wrote about here. Check out the new CapitalWords.org.

Cute old guy photo CC via Flickr user aflcio2008.

Context

Oil dependency is a big enough problem that it threatens the very continuity of life on earth and leads to unfathomable human rights. If the McCain project leads to a solution to this problem, we will shut up and be thankful. There's no guarantee it will work, though, it is very limited in its imagination and we believe that strategies like this should be the exception and not the rule.

In the 20th century, during industrialization's heyday, big public goals made sense. Today, in an era transformed by technology empowering the individual like few things ever have before, questions for which the answers are already known may prove less valuable than open-ended inquiries with substantial institutional support.

The UK government's Show Us a Better Way project, while tiny in comparison, represents a new era of thought leadership. The government is offering to expose public data to developers without presuming to know what could be done with it. "Here's what we've got, what can you do with it?" is a great question to ask. We would love to see Show Us a Better Way get the kind of financial support that McCain is proposing for the battery project. The resulting application development could radically improve human quality of life in more ways than can be imagined.

McCain, unfortunately, admits that he doesn't know how to use a computer. Perhaps someone can explain APIs and mashups to him in the event that he wins the Presidency.

Early Examples

The UK government provides a number of unaffiliated early examples of reused public data including the following:

Location Data

From UpMyStreet location profiles to Fix My Street streamlined repair requesting to the fantastic prison quality review site Rate My Prison - the possibilities here are huge. Imagine integration of 3rd party services like Yahoo's Location Metadata Database and FireEagle location tracking, mashed up with government data.

Public Discourse

SpinDifferent compares public policy statements on the same topics from the UK, US and UN. Comment on This repurposes governement documents to facilitate public comment.

You can see a full list of ideas submitted so far here.

We'd like to imagine mobile mashups serving up data for the benefit of children, the elderly and the environment. DVR mashups offering genuine cultural enrichment. GPS mashups for public health. The possibilities are endless.

No single organization, perhaps especially government, can rival the imagination and innovation that the public at large can offer - if only the public received the resources that government has at its disposal. Some of these ideas may come in the form of new functionality and knowledge creation, some of them may come in the form of new interfaces. Check out the US nonprofit project OpenCongress.org for one example of a beautiful, cutting edge interface that government itself is unlikely to have ever created for public data (our review).

We hope that a solution to the particular problem of internal combustion automobiles can be found, but we also hope that governments around the world will take inspiration from this UK initiative and dedicate substantial resources to supporting free public use of the data that government has amassed. If data is the new currency, then then public APIs and mashups could be the economic development paradigm of this century.

Another Sunlight Foundation project is Get Represented. In a nutshell, Get Represented uses the GetSatisfaction model of public corporate discourse and applies it to Congress. Student Kyle Powers worked on this project for the Summer of Code in order to create a public feedback mechanism for government decision-making. Members of Congress have their own GetRepresented page and voters can comment, vote up articles and have public conversations with their representatives. While the final product is not yet available to the public, you can check for updates on the Sunlight Labs blog.

To view more Summer of Code projects visit the Google Open Source Programs page.

The Progressive Change Campaign Committee's petition logged 225,000 signatures on its joint petition with Reddit and Craigslist. Protestors made over 40,000 calls to Capitol Hill.

MoveOn.org participated in the Internet blackout day and also collected 310,000 signatures for its SOPA/PIPA petition. It raised Internet awareness with a few graphics, too, including "None Of The Links On Our Site Are Working Today", which was viewed more than 23,000 times.

But SOPA/PIPA isn't dead yet. Politico reports that Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), a cosponsor of the bill, and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz), who is leaning toward "no," are in discussions to exempt search-result blocking from PIPA. For now, it's still unclear whether the bill will pass. It is scheduled for a procedural vote on Tuesday.

Of course there are far more than 100 great Web products out there, so there are some excellent ones not included in our megalist. Please leave a comment here and tell us what we've missed!

• Best LittleCo of 2008 & Most Promising for 2009
• Best BigCo of 2008: Apple
• Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 International Products of 2008
• Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
• Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008
• Top 10 Real World Web Apps of 2008
• Top 10 Digital Lifestyle Products of 2008
• Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008
• Top 10 Web Platforms of 2008

Note that seven products made it to more than one of our top 10 lists, so we've noted when that is the case and added some new products that just missed the cut somewhere along the line.

ReadWriteWeb's Top 100 Products

This list is in alphabetical order, with category noted beside each item.

• Adobe AIR; Platforms
• Afrigator; International
• Amazon Web Services; Platforms & Enterprise *
• Android; Platforms & Digital Lifestyle *
• App Store (iPhone); Digital Lifestyle
• Basecamp; Enterprise
• BBC iPlayer; Digital Lifestyle
• BlueOrganizer (AdaptiveBlue); Semantic Web
• BooRah; Semantic Web
• Brightkite; Mobile Web; Most Promising for 2009
• ChaCha; Alternative Search Engines
• Chrome; runner-up Platforms
• Cooliris; Consumer & Alternative Search Engines
• Confluence (Atlassian); Enterprise
• Dapper; RSS/Syndication & MashupAds for Semantic Web *
• Digg; runner-up, Consumer
• DimDim; Enterprise
• Dopplr; International
• Facebook Platform; Platforms
• Faroo; Alternative Search Engines
• Feedburner; RSS/Syndication
• FFtoGo; Mobile Web
• Fire Eagle; Platforms
• Firefox; Consumer
• Flickr; runner-up Consumer
• Force.com (Salesforce); Enterprise
• FreshBooks; International
• FriendFeed; RSS/Syndication
• Fring; Mobile Web
• Gnip; RSS/Syndication
• Google Apps; Enterprise
• Google Maps; Mobile Web
• Google Reader; RSS/Syndication
• Google Reader RSS Subscriber Count Greasemonkey Script; RSS/Syndication
• Hakia; Semantic Web
• Hulu; Digital Lifestyle & Consumer *
• Imeem; runner-up Consumer
• IntenseDebate; Consumer
• iPhone SDK; Platforms
• i.TV; Mobile Web
• KallOut; Alternative Search Engines
• Kiva; Real World
• Kosmix; Alternative Search Engines
• Last.fm; Consumer
• LinkedIn; Enterprise
• Live Mesh; Platforms
• Maxthon; International
• Mednar; Alternative Search Engines
• Meebo; Consumer
• MindTouch Deki; Enterprise
• Mint; Real World
• Mixi; International
• Mogulus; Consumer
• Mozilla Weave; Platforms
• MySpace; runner-up Consumer
• Netbook; Digital Lifestyle
• Netflix; Digital Lifestyle
• Netvibes; International
• Ning; Consumer
• Nokia E71; Digital Lifestyle
• NYTimes iPhone App; Mobile Web
• OpenCongress; Real World
• OpenSocial; Platforms
• Open Calais; Semantic Web
• Opera Mini/Mobile; Mobile Web
• Pandora; Mobile Web
• PatientsLikeMe; Real World
• PlayStation 3; Digital Lifestyle
• PlanetEye; Real World
• Postrank (ex-AideRSS); RSS/Syndication
• Powerset; Semantic Web
• Qik; Consumer
• Quintura; Alternative Search Engines
• Remember The Milk; International
• Rudder; Real World
• SearchMonkey; Semantic Web
• SeeqPod; Alternative Search Engines
• Sermo; Real World
• Shazam; Mobile Web
• Snackr; RSS/Syndication
• Songbird; Digital Lifestyle
• Surf Canyon; Alternative Search Engines
• Taggalaxy.de; Alternative Search Engines
• TeachStreet; Real World
• Techmeme; runner-up RSS/Syndication
• TripIt; Semantic Web
• Twitter; Mobile Web & Consumer; Twitter API, Platforms *
• Twitterfeed; RSS/Syndication
• UpTake; Semantic Web
• UStream; runner-up Consumer
• Wii Fit; Digital Lifestyle
• Wild Apricot; Real World
• Wordpress; Enterprise
• Wuala; International
• Xing; International
• Yahoo! Pipes; RSS/Syndication
• Yapta; Real World
• YouTube; runner-up Consumer
• Zemanta; Semantic Web
• Zoho; Enterprise & International; Best LittleCo *

* products in more than one list. There were seven of these: Amazon Web Services, Android, Cooliris, Dapper, Hulu, Twitter, Zoho

This is the seventh in our series of top products of 2008:

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
4. Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
5. Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008
6. Top 10 Enterprise Web Products of 2008

Finance

Mint

Mint single-handedly changed the market for personal finance tools on the Internet in 2008 and forced Quicken, its closest competitor, to start offering its own online tools for free as well. Mint aggregates personal finance data from across the web and displays a consolidated view of all of your accounts in a very well designed and easy to use user interface. Mint also uses this data to recommend better credit cards and savings accounts to its users.

Mint launched its beta program in late 2007 and came out of beta in October 2008.  By October, Mint already had close to half a million users and had managed over $12 billion in transactions. In the course of 2008, Mint added a substantial number of new features to its lineup, including the ability to get an overview of your investment accounts. Mint also launched a major redesign of its user interface in August.

Rudder

While Rudder might look similar to Mint at first, this personal finance tool has a very different focus. While Rudder also aggregates your banking and credit card accounts, it does not focus on analyzing your past spending habits in the way Mint does. Instead, its focuse is on the letting you know how much money you still have to pay your monthly bills. One of the great advantages of Rudder is that it sends all your updates to your inbox, so that you don't even have to log in to the service to keep up to date.

Rudder debuted at this year's DEMOfall conference in San Diego and, given the current economic situation, couldn't have launched at a more opportune time. Rudder also features a large number of useful finance planning tools and a great mobile site.

Health

PatientsLikeMe

PatientsLikeMe is an online community for people with life-changing medical conditions like Multiple Sclerosis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or Fibromyalgia. Even though the site is still relatively now, it already provides on of the largest patient communities, and also features a wide range of research tools for symptoms and treatments.

PatientsLikeMe was founded in 2004 and defines its mission as providing a platform for sharing real world medical data. Members of the site often share data about their individual health experiences like symptoms, weight, mood swings, or drugs they have taken. Thanks to this, you can easily find others who are in the same situation as you and see what treatments are working for them.

Earlier this year, we named PatiensLikeMe as one of our favorite Web 2.0 health apps.

Sermo

Our second top health app is also a social network, but this time for physicians. Sermo has over 90,000 members who exchange information about both medical and non-medical issues. As Matthew Holt from the Health Care Blog pointed out to us, the site also features some highly sophisticated survey and ratings tools, though it is only open to registered physicians.

This year, Sermo also rolled out a partnership with Bloomberg that provides healthcare investors with access to medical information compiled by the site's members.

Education

TeachStreet

TeachStreet is not an educational site in the traditional sense. Instead, it provides a marketplace for teachers and students to meet. TeachStreet, whose motto is 'Learn New Things,' focuses mostly on teaching adults anything from arts and crafts, to bagpiping and foreign languages. TeachStreet started out in Seattle, WA, but expanded to Portland, OR and the Bay Area this year. The site already lists over 60,000 different classes and instructors.

TeachStreet is an interesting tool, both for teachers to gain more visibility, and for students to find the right classes and teachers. Thanks to its excellent search functions and well-designed layout, TeachStreet has already made a name for itself in the regions where it has officially launched and is poised for more growth in 2009.

After the jump: Politics, Non-Profits, Travel

Politics

OpenCongress

While the U.S. election surely dominated the news this year, one non-election related web app that we really came to appreciate this year was OpenCongress. OpenCongress is a project by the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation and is definitely a must for political junkies. The site tracks all the news and votes in the U.S. Congress through an easy to use interface that features a lot of AJAX and RSS. The site even supports OpenID and also provides its users with a large number of widgets they can implement on their own sites.

As our own Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed out in his review of the site, it makes users "want to pay attention to politics because the user experience is so smooth and compelling."

Non-Profits

Kiva

Kiva is a micro-lending service that was founded in 2005 and at that time, it was the first person-to-person micro-ending site on the net. Kiva allows its users to lend small amounts of money to entrepreneurs in developing nations. The loans typically go towards starting up or expanding small, local businesses, ranging from a motorcycle repair shop in Lebanon to tailors in Pakistan.

In November, Kiva announced that over $50 million have now been lend by Kiva's over 330,000 members. This is a major success for the organization, especially given that Kiva had only loaned $11 million by September 2007. Kiva also ran a successful billboard campaign in California thanks to the help of PayPal.

The current financial crisis is obviously affecting Kiva and the organization is already seeing fewer lenders. Hopefully, this trend will reverse in 2009.

Wild Apricot

Wild Apricot provides software-as-a-service solutions to small and medium sized associations, clubs, and non-profits. It has created tightly integrated solutions for membership management, event registration, and creating customized web sites, with a focus on the non-profit sector. Service plans range from free to a flat fee of $200 a month, depending on the size of the contact database you plan to manage on the service.

In 2008, Wild Apricot rolled out a number of updates to its software, including support for Google Checkout, custom URLs, and better group management. Currently, Wild Apricot has more than 10,000 non-profit organizations as clients. We also like the company's well-written and informative blog about technology for non-profits.

Disclosure: Wild Apricot is a RWW sponsor.

Travel

Yapta

The web clearly revolutionized the travel industry. Booking flights and vacations online has quickly become a routine activity, even for less savvy web users. While Yapta launched in 2006, it was really only in 2008 that the site was able to differentiate itself from larger competitors like Kayak, FareCompare,  or Farecast. In June, Yapta announced a new feature that allows you to track airfare changes, and in November, Yapta unveiled a unique service that also allows you to track when and where you can use you frequent flier miles to book a flight.

While it's probably best to take this data with a grain of salt, Yapta claims to have saved its users over $91 million in airfare since May 2007.

PlanetEye

PlanetEye is a social travel site with a strong focus on providing both user-generated content, as well as stories from local editors all over the world. One of the core features of PlanetEye are its Travel Packs, which let you clip content from the site while you are planning your trip. This allows you to easily create your own personalized travel guides. PlanetEye came out of beta in the middle of 2008 and has already managed to established a loyal community of users on its service. PlanetEye also partnered with Travelocity, OpenTable, and StubHub.

Besides giving you great info for planning your trip, PlanetEye also lets you share geotagged photos with the rest of the PlanetEye community. The highlight of the service, however, is the content added by PlanetEye's local experts which ranges from blog posts to reviews of restaurants and local sights.

That's our list of 'real world' web apps that we think have made a difference to mainstream people in 2008. Let us know in the comments what your favorites are.

The committee meeting was recorded by C-Span and video of the hearing is available.

In an extremely thorough examination, Trevor Timm of Legal As She Is Spoke, has made a very convincing case that Wikileaks has not broken the law.

"'Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document...relating to the national defense...willfully communicates... the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it...[s]hall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.'"

As made clear in the Pentagon Papers case, the word 'communicates' was never meant 'to encompass publication' or to affect the press."

The witness list for the hearing included Thomas Blanton of the National Security Archive at George Washington University; Geoffrey Stone, former dean of the University of Chicago Law School; and Ralph Nader for some reason.

Some legislators, most prominently Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, and Diane Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have called for Assange to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

However, given the extreme uncertainty of the outcome they desire, Lieberman has introduced the SHIELD Act (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination). On his website, Lieberman makes it 100% clear that this law was written not so much to protect the country, to make up for a gap in the existing law, as it is to go after and get Assange.

"(T)he SHIELD Act, would give the Administration increased flexibility to go after Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange by making it illegal to publish the names of human intelligence informants (HUMINT) to the United States military and intelligence community."

The video of the meeting is actually interesting. It goes surprisingly far beyond the usual electioneering you see in these sorts of hearings, especially expected in one whose topic is so fraught. The majority of the legislators seem to actually care about the First Amendment, even when the speech it protects is odious to them. There is also a great deal of examination of the perils of over-classification of both diplomatic and military materials.

Was there anything in the hearing that you found particularly surprising? If so, please share it in the comments.

Many people will likely come to the SXSW Web Awards at the Hilton on Sunday night hoping to discover the next big thing. The fact is, though, that the annual Web Awards are all about design - not social functionality a la Twitter. In years past, most of us have ended up leaving the room afterward scratching our heads and saying "I've never even heard of those websites." But not this year. Check out the RWW Guide to the SXSW Web Awards Finalists below, where you'll find brief scannable explanations of who and what is behind the 80+ companies and projects that have been named as finalists for the awards.

This year the award ceremony will be hosted by The Onion's Baratunde Thurston. Baratunde is a must-know dude and says about the Web Awards finalists: "I look forward to making one of the companies in each category very happy."

The bulk of the research below was done by ReadWriteWeb Research Intern Nisha Chittal, who will also be at SXSW - so friend her up on Twitter!

We hope to see you in Austin. We're really looking forward to it! If you are going too, you might enjoy attending the Monday morning panel Beyond Aggregation - Finding the Web's Best Content. I'll be on that one, along with Techmeme co-founder Gabe Rivera, PostRank community manager Melanie Baker, Micah Baldwin, Biz Dev VP at Lijit and ultra-early-adopter Louis Gray.

Without further ado, here are the Web Awards Finalists!

Activism

Cliff Bar 2 Mile Challenge

The Cliff Bar company encourages bike riding with a Flash site that lets you build or choose between custom bike and gear packages, then tells you where you can buy it all. Track your bike travel and reduce climate impact. Built by San Francisco's Cobra Creative.
On Twitter: 2MileChallenge

IAmSecond

Plano, Texas based e3 Partners Ministry gathered a collection of famous and everyday people offering video commentary about why they put their religious faith first in their lives.
On Twitter: IamSecond

Just in Queso

Just in Queso is a charitable, not-for-profit foundation that provides funds and resources for those in need. The company believes that tragedy rarely gives warning, so they provide funds to those in need after emergencies. They raise funds by selling Just in Queso Hot Sauce, and 100% of all proceeds from every sale go back to communities in the form of aid and donations.

Sunny Side

Run by The Truth campaign, this website aims to provide a satiric look at the truth and the unhealthy side of tobacco and cigarettes.

Tweet Congress

Tweet Congress is a website that allows you to search by location and find out if your Congressman or Senator is on Twitter - and if they aren't, sign a petition asking them to join Twitter.
On Twitter: TweetCongress

Amusement

CrappyCat

CrappyCat is an interactive game where a cat traverses through a gothic backdrop and fights monsters using the power of alcohol.

Addictionary

Addictionary is a website for word lovers that allows people to play with words. Share new and amusing words and words-of-the-day, create new words, and participate in word challenges.
On Twitter: Addictionary

GirlGamer.com

GirlGamer is a community, digital magazine, and video game review site for
female gamers. It is currently in private beta.
On Twitter: GirlGamer

Pixton

Pixton is a website where people all over the world create, share, and remix comics without having to draw. According to their exhibitor profile, they'll be premiering the world's first remixable animated comics at SXSW.
On Twitter: Pixton

UPS Regifter

UPS Regifter is a service that allows to to re-gift when you receive a gift you don't like -- by taking a picture of your ridiculous gift, uploading it, and
sending it to friends.

Art

StreetArtLocator

Street Art Locator is an interactive website featuring a large map of the world that allows you to locate places where you can find cool new street art -- anywhere in the world.

Forward Thinking Museum

The Forward Thinking Museum is an interactive virtual museum that allows visitors to study key issues of the future such as nuclear weapons and global warming.

Remembering Bogle Chandler

Remembering Bogle Chandler is a website combining sounds, images, and text that recreates eyewitness accounts of the tragic and mysterious deaths of Margaret Chandler and Gib Bogle in 1963 in Australia.

The Served

The Served is a website promoting the latest in creative works, with a stream of new projects in fashion, industrial design, photography, motion graphics, and typography

Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far

This website is a community-based project where readers contribute what they have learned in life so far through words, videos, photography, and design.

Blog

The Big Picture

The Big Picture is a Boston news blog told through photographs of the city's recent news and events each day.

Bygone Bureau

Bygone Bureau is a blog of travel writing and cultural criticism that updates three times a week. It describes itself as a "journal of modern thought."

Dumb As a Blog

Dumb as a Blog is a blog sharing tidbits of the dumb stuff people to do every day.

OneRiot.com

OneRiot is a social search engine that allows you to search information on the internet, but prioritizes it according to its popularity in the OneRiot community.

Postcards from My Momma
Postcards from my Momma is a blog that asks readers to share their funniest and most interesting correspondences with their mothers.

Business

CNN Shirt

CNN Shirt is an interactive website that allows you to scan the day's top headlines, pick one, and order a customized t-shirt with your CNN headline of choice.

Jasmax

Jasmax is an architecture firm.

Lowe's "Welcome Back Spring"

This website is an interactive website getting Lowe's shoppers excited about welcoming back spring by allowing them to explore people's gardens and yards and pick out Lowe's products that they like as well as gain gardening tips and advice.

Modernista!

Modernista is a creative advertising firm whose website allows you to "view Modernista! through the eyes of the web." It is very hard to describe and kind of disturbing.
On Twitter: Modernista

Zeus Jones Gift Site

This website is an interactive guide that helps you pick a gift for anyone in your life by inputting your criteria: budget, gender, age/maturity, relationship, and more. Created by Zeus Jones Marketing Firm.

CSS

Eden Sessions

This interactive website, home to the band The Eden Project, promotes the Eden Sessions -- the Eden project's series of one-day summer music festivals. Website designed by Richard Quick Designs.

Trevor Exter

This website is the homepage to musician Trevor Exter. Designed by This Design Studio.

Mint.com

Mint.com is a popular web-based financial software that allows people to organize their finances, create budgets, and track spending.
On Twitter: Mintdotcom

Noisefreak.com

Noisefreak is an audio production company that does commercials, promos, and
radio production.

ProjectMiso

ProjectMiso is interactive studio that designs and develops interactive media and custom applications. Their clients include Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Pfizer USP, and the NYC Teaching Fellows.

Classic

ArsTechnica

Ars Technica is a website dedicated to tech industry news and analysis, reviews, reporting, and commentary.
On Twitter: Arstechnica

Flickr

Flickr is a photo-sharing website and community. Users can upload and share photos with friends, participate in the "Creative Commons," explore photography from around the world, and more.

Instructables

Instructables is a how-to website where users document what they do and how they do it, using pictures, video, audio, and text. Popular projects are then featured for other users to learn from.
On Twitter: Instructables

Picnik

Picnik is a web-based free photo editor that lets users upload their photos and creatively edit them with their photo editing tools.
On Twitter: Picnik

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site that allows users to submit and share what they're reading and enjoying right now, and vote on what content is most popular. It uses a recommendation algorithm to create a seemingly serendipitous experience wandering through related content.

Delicious 2.0

Delicious is a social bookmarking site where users bookmark links they like, tag them, and share them with each other. It's a Yahoo! property and underwent a dramatic redesign last year.

Community

Lost Zombies

Lost Zombies is a community-generated zombie documentary. The website aims to collect 10,000 user-submitted photos and 1,000 user-submitted videos about zombies, which will be put together in a documentary.
On Twitter:LostZombies

Fluther

Fluther is a community website where users ask questions, get answers, and discuss them with the rest of the community. It is a community of people and ordinary experts sharing knowledge.
On Twitter: Fluther

Protagonize

Protagonize is a fiction writing community website where users share, discuss, collaborate on, and learn from fiction stories that they have created. Designed by Taunt Media.
On Twitter: Protagonize

Trusera

Trusera is an online community centered around health. Users submit health questions for discussion, get answers from each other, get personalized health advice, and connect with users with similar health experiences.
On Twitter: Trusera_health

Education

The Cycle

The Cycle is an interactive video website that features short videos that simulate how the recycling process really works, behind the scenes.

Discovery Earth Live

Created by the Discovery Channel, this interactive website allows users to learn about the earth's ocean's and tides.

From Ellis Island to OrchardStreet

This website from the Tenement Museum takes visitors through a classic-film style tour of life as an immigrant in early 20th-century America, then allows you to create your own immigrant story.

HowStuffWorks

Here you can learn exactly what the title says -- how stuff works. The website features a plethora of articles about almost every topic under the sun, and explanations of how things really work behind the scenes.

OneHen

This Flash website uses stories, pictures, and videos to teach children all about microfinance and how it works. There are also sections for parents and educators to learn about microfinance and how they might spread awareness, donate, or get otherwise involved.

Experimental

Foul Owl Karaoke

Foul Owl is a interactive music visualization tool that uses animals and cartoon creatures.

Popego

Popego is a website that helps filter content to see what videos, music, and content match the user's interested based on what interests they list and what their friends are enjoying.
On Twitter: Popego

Sweemo

Sweemo is an online auction and retail service that allows users to buy and sell experiences, knowledge, or skills instead of products -- think Ebay for experiences.
On Twitter: Sweemodotcom

Ten Thousand Cents

Ten Thousand Cents is a piece of artwork; it is a digital representation of a one-hundred dollar bill, created by 10,000 Amazon mechanical Turk workers who were each paid one cent for their task. Workers from 51 countries were involved in the project. The final project shows a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously.

We Tell Stories

We Tell Stories is a project launched by publisher Penguin UK, where six authors
will write six stories each over the course of six weeks -- stories that relate to the immediacy and connectivity of the internet today. There is also a mysterious "secret" seventh story involved in the project, which will give readers the chance to win prizes from Penguin UK.

Film/ Television

Flight of the Conchords Lip Dub

In this HBO TV show website, users download music videos, videotape themselves
lip-synching the songs, and then upload them to the website for everyone to watch. The contest is now over, and a final winner is going to be chosen soon.

The Flight of the Conchords is not on Twitter, which is a shame.

Hulu

Hulu is an online video service offering free movies and TV shows from major
companies such as NBC, FOX, MGM Studios, Sony, and Warner Brothers. There are
over 1000 primetime TV shows available.
On Twitter: HuluDotCom

In Plain Sight: WITSEC Confidential

This website was created for USA Network's TV show "In Plain Sight," a show about the Federal Witness Protection Program. The website allows users to play an interactive game where they protect witnesses from criminals and find clues to solve crimes.

Jinni

Jinni is a movie search-and-recommendation engine that allows users to search the internet for movies that match their interests. It allows users to search for films based on specific features like plot elements, genre, characters, etc. It is currently in private beta.

On Twitter: JinniMedia

The Secret Location

The Secret Location is an interactive media company specializing in entertainment properties combining interactive, film, animation, and motion design. Their website is set up in the form of an interactive video about a mysterious secret location.

Games

Adult Swim Games

This website, home of Adult Swim TV shows, features a host of interactive games and episodes of your favorite Adult Swim shows.

Globulos

Globulos is a French multi-player flash game featuring little "globs" as the main characters. It was launched in 2003 and is available on the web, on mobile and the Nintendo DS.

PMOG

PMOG stands for the "Passively Multiplayer Online Game." Users install the game into their browser and it turns the whole internet into one game as you go from website to website.

On Twitter: Pmog

PlayCrafter

PlayCrafter features an online game maker that allows the user to create their own flash game and then share it with their friends. They can also enter contests to see who can create the best game.

Why So Serious? The Dark Knight Alternate Reality Game

This game is based off of the hit 2008 film "The Dark Knight." The game allows you to live in the world of the Dark Night, play out events, and create your own alternate reality.

Mobile

AP Mobile News Network

The AP Mobile News Network (MNN) allows you to get all news, all the time, on your mobile phone through a special application for iPhones, BlackBerrys, and other smartphones. It's powered by Transpera.
On Twitter: AP_Mobile

Brightkite

Brightkite is a location-based social networking website where you input your location from your phone and see who else is nearby. You can see our extensive coverage of Brightkite here.
On Twitter: Brightkite

Gigotron

Gigotron is a location-based iPhone app that helps you locate where local bands are playing live shows wherever you are. Seth Jacobs of video production shop EQAL (makers of Lonelygirl15) calls Gigotron on of his "top 5 iPhone geek apps."

On Twitter: Gigotron

Pikchur

Pikchur is a photo-based website that lets you take pictures and share them on the go through your phone and a host of social networking applications. The company also offers an image preview script for Twitter.

On Twitter:Pikchur

Please Fix the iPhone

This website is a place where iPhone users list their complaints that they want to see fixed about the iPhone, and then users vote for their most favorite complaints in hopes that Apple will fix them. It's fun to see the many things people say about the site on Twitter.

Motion Graphics

ADE Creative Studios

ADE is a creative studio specializing in graphic design, motion design, 3-d animation, and more. They have a very busy website.

Corona Beach

The Corona Beach lets you take a break from your day on an interactive beach with a (interactive) Corona. It was the work of New York's Big Spaceship and Chicago's Cramer-Krasselt.

NVIDIA Speak Visual

NVIDIA is a company that produces high-quality graphics processors for computers. Their website features a gallery of stories from customers who have NVIDIA graphics processors.

Synergy - ThyssenKrupp Elevator Corporation

ThysenKrupp is an elevator company and Synergy is their first global elevator system. It comes with a model design that can be custom-fit to meet local codes around the globe.

What's Your Lighting Style?

This website, from GE, allows users to determine the lighting style that's right for them, with a set of lighting tips, videos, an interactive quiz to find your lighting style, and information about all of GE's lightbulb products.

Music

Tracy Chapman

Tracy Chapman is a folk music artist, who has just released the new album "Our bright future." She is a multi-platinum and four-time Grammy award-winning artist.

The Finetune Family

The Finetune Family is an online music service that allows users to discover new music, create playlists, and organize favorite artists and albums. Users can get Finetune online, on their desktop, embedded in their browser, on their mobile device, in a Facebook app, on their Wii, on their TV, or in a widget.

Soundcloud

Soundcloud is a tool for artists, record labels, and other music professionals to easily send, receive, and distribute music files online. We wrote a well received review of Soundcloud here in December.

On Twitter: Soundcloud

Spiritualized Harmonies

Spiritualized Harmonies is the high-tech new website of the band Spiritualized, a psychedelic/experimental/rock band.Their latest album, now out, is called "Songs in A&E."

James Zabiela

James Zabiela is a recording artist specializing in house, breakbeat, and techno music. His new album, "Renaissance: the Masters Series," will be out February 23.

Personal Portfolio

Ali Felski

Ali Felski is a Washington, DC-based independent graphic designer. She previously worked for the federal government and now works for the Sunlight Foundation, promoting transparency in government. The Sunlight Foundation's work is fabulous. See our reviews of their sites OpenCongress and Capitol Words.

On Twitter: Felskia

Pericycle

Pericycle is the personal portfolio of designer Gabriel Bach, housing a collection of his work in print, websites, postcards, flyers, and more.

Eric Piasecki Stocksearch

Eric Piasecki is a travel photographer whose "Stocksearch" website lets you easily search through all his work, save and download images, and order prints.

Revyver

Revyver is a two-person web design company run by an engaged couple. Revyver
specializes in designing web applications and games. Revyver was acquired in
November 2008 by SpectrumDNA.

On Twitter: Revyver

Lynn Marie Smith

Lynn Marie Smith is an author, speaker, and activist who is a former ecstasy addict and now speaks out about addiction. She uses her website to communicate with teens, young adults, and parents around the world about drug addiction, and will be turning these communications into a book.

Student

Business of Detention

Business of Detention is an online publication made by journalism students that covers the "business of detention" -- privatized immigration detention in the United States.

Michael Dick

This website is the homepage and portfolio of web designer and programmer Michael Dick.

On Twitter: MichaelDick

Modernity Spirit of Experimentation

Modernity Spirit of Experimentation is a website showcasing innovate designs in furniture, glass, ceramic, and accessory design, by various designers.

Think Artificial

Think Artificial is the blog of a computer science student in Iceland, where he writes about the "science of artificial" -- the world of technology from a semi-technical perspective.

Weekend Pictures

Weekend Pictures is a project that explores the topics of the internet, user-generated content, and privacy. It aims to help visitors maximize their use of the internet as a creative outlet while safeguarding privacy.

Technical Achievement

Absolut Machines

Absolut Machines, created by Absolut, aims to explore the intersection of art and technology by inviting renowned designers and engineers to create machines that website visitors could then interact with over the internet. Make Magazine's Phillip Torrone took a tour and got some great photos and video of the project last February.

Aviary

Aviary is a multi-tool suite of collaborative image editing web applications. We've written about Aviary a number of times, most recently in October.

jQuery UI ThemeRoller

This website from jQuery allows you to "roll" your own website theme using a simple theme-creator tool. Input your criteria for colors, fonts, design, content, and more.

On Twitter: JQueryUI

SkyDeck

Skydeck is an application that lets you see your cell phone, online. It displays all your calls, texts, voicemails, call notes, connections, and more, and then lets you search, read, and respond to communications online. We reviewed Skydeck here last month.

On Twitter: Skydeck

Tarpipe

Tarpipe is an online tool that streamlines all your social media communications, and then lets you publish content across the web from one easy place. Check out our coverage of Tarpipe here.

On Twitter: Tarpipe