ReadWriteWeb

Back when the United States was born, people who needed to do research would sometimes ride a horse for days to get to the nearest library. Today, the U.S. Library of Congress made its THOMAS website for information about legislative activity updatable by tweet. We are truly living in the future.

There may be millions of webpages around the Internet that display a widget of recent Tweets, but when the Library of Congress does it, I think that's notable because of the organization's prominence, its public role and its complicated relationship with transparency. "One of our goals with the Twitter account is to provide timely alerts about legislative developments and, with this change, now we can do that directly from the homepage," explained Andrew Weber, Senior Legal Information Analyst at the Library of Congress this morning, in a post on the Library's blog.

Courts in the United States are not just about high profile litigation and murder cases. Most of the grunt work of the U.S. legal system is done in district courts and chances are you have probably been there contesting speeding tickets or for some other menial rite of legal malaise. Yet, what you do not know about the legal process could hurt you the day you show up and are not prepared.

OpenCourt is a project by WBUR, the Boston University affiliate of National Public Radio, funded by the Knight Foundation to increase knowledge and interaction of the legal process by placing a streaming cameras in courtrooms. A couple of MacBooks Pros, a Canon HD camcorder and Livestream and you have your very own reality television.

The Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan organization that uses the Internet to promote government transparency and openness, is celebrating its fifth anniversary this week. The foundation uses data analysis to report on government activity and trains journalists in the use of data to tell the story about what the federal government is actually up to.

We often cover the Sunlight Foundation and what they are doing. For the anniversary they sent a note to all their kindred spirits in the cause of open government. "We've grown from a small organization with big ideas to a connected community whose call for greater government openness and transparency is heard throughout the country," wrote Nicko Margolies, communications coordinator at the Sunlight Foundation.

For most people, East Timor, known officially as the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, came to public notice in 2002 when it gained official independence from Indonesian occupation after a long, violent struggle that included the use by the Indonesian military of starvation as a tool for genocide.. In the time since, the country has experienced the usual amount of election violence and corruption that a new nation sees.

Now, the Timorese government has opened a FreeBalance-powered portal devoted to government financial transparency.

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.

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When Gmail is slow, Amazon trips, when there is a Facebook issue, or Foursquare's API crashes, people get upset, and tens of thousands reveal their anxiety on social networks.

We noted last year, that many believe U.S. President Obama's push for governmental transparency has been a failure. Whether that's true, the overall tendency toward access continues to gather momentum.

The U.S. House of Representatives has announced a public hearing to explore making publicly-funded research open to the public. Legislators in both the House and the Senate have already introduced bills calling for this. If they pass, the implications could be significant and might result in an economic jump.

BurstNET, the host for the blog platform Blogetery, released a statement today. Blogetery's 70,000 blogs were shut down with little notice last week, as we reported yesterday.

"BurstNET received a notice of a critical nature from law enforcement officials, and was asked to provide information regarding ownership of the server hosting Blogetry.com. It was revealed that a link to terrorist material, including bomb-making instructions and an al-Qaeda 'hit list,' had been posted to the site."

Blogetery, a Wordpress platform, has seen its entire community shut down by its host, BurstNET. Subsequent statements by BurstNET indicated that the service was suspended at the request of an unidentified law enforcement agency.

"(Blogetery) was terminated by request of law enforcement officials, due to material hosted on the server. We are limited as to the details we can provide to you, but note that this was a critical matter and the only available option to us was to immediately deactivate the server."

Here at ReadWriteStart, we've mentioned the importance of credibility as an entrepreneur when meeting with venture capitalists and potential investors, but it is also important to carry that credibility forward into your company as you interface with customers. Amid rumors that it was extorting businesses by offering to de-emphasize negative reviews in return for adverting purchases, social review site Yelp announced Monday that it would be "lifting the veil" on its review system and removing controversial features in hopes of securing customer trust.