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The Sunlight Foundation's Sunlight Labs made its Real Time Congress API available today. "The Real Time Congress API (RTC) is a RESTful API over the artifacts of Congress, kept up to date in as close to real time as possible," the announcement says. Data is available in both JSON and XML.

StreamCongress is already using the new API to stream floor updates.

Mobile technology, virtualization, the social web, cloud computing - a think tank study has all our good friends on a hit list.

The study, which shows primary security and privacy concerns of U.S. government IT leaders, is making the rounds among military and government bloggers. Policy makers are being told that the applications we know and love are dangerous and pose gaping security loopholes for cyberterrorism. Is a Big Brother overprotective meltdown? Or are our advances really causing greater risks for all users?

In keeping with Mayor Bloomberg's focus on innovation, transparency, accessibility, and accountability, New York City is today launching the NYC BigApps Competition, a challenge to developers to create software based on city data.

The competition will be hosted by ChallengePost, an online network for organizations and individuals to create and offer competitions. The launch of NYC BigApps will be also be officially announced at tonight's NY Tech Meetup. So, what's in it for developers? Read on.

Some people go to Washington to try to make the government more honest; others try to make it smaller. Technologist Tim O'Reilly is spending time in Washington, and bringing Washington officials to San Francisco, to do something different - perhaps something more realistic. O'Reilly is trying to help government become a platform for innovation. A "government as platform" would supply raw digital data and other forms of support for private sector innovators to build on top of.

Tim O'Reilly is a publisher of technical books, the organizer of a series of conferences on diverse topics, an investor in web startup companies and smart electrical grid technologies. He's credited with shepharding the term Web 2.0 into public consciousness and he regularly uses his extensive influence to call on technologists to "do something worthy," especially in the face of ecological and political crisis. Now he's brokering meetings of Obama administration officials and bleeding-edge geeks.

Top government IT officials and representatives from online identity services met today in Washington DC to talk about plans to allow 3rd party certification bodies, called "Trust Framework Providers," to evaluate private sector OpenID and Info Card providers for use in logging into government agency websites.

The Open Government Identity Management Solutions Privacy Workshop is being held in Washington DC to draft a process for certifying existing identity providers for low-security government authentication transactions (so-called NIST level 1). If the plans move forward, we may someday be able to log in to government sites using our favorite OpenID-supporting website credentials. Google, AOL, Yahoo or other commercial accounts could become new keys to a consistent experience around the .gov web.

Journalism has always been about reporting facts and assertions and making sense of world affairs. No news there. But as we move further into the 21st century, we will have to increasingly rely on "data" to feed our stories, to the point that "data-driven reporting" becomes second nature to journalists.

The shift from facts to data is subtle and makes perfect sense. You could that say data are facts, with the difference that they can be computed, analyzed, and made use of in a more abstract way, especially by a computer.