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.

There's something a little funny about seeing a Twitter widget on the front page of the THOMAS site, but it sure does get the job done. It's not Facebook, Google Plus or the open-source, federated service Status dot net (wouldn't that be nice to see). No, it's a microblogging service now extensively owned by a sprawling Russian investment group that was used. I guess you've got to go where the people are. Hey, I love Twitter as much as the next person.

The Library of Congress, believe it or not, has not in all cases always been so interested in transparent communication with its constituents. In early 2009, back before Wikileaks was famous for leaking diplomatic cables, the organization leaked what it said was a billion dollars worth of research reports from the Library's Congressional Research Service. Public release of those documents had allegedly been opposed on the grounds that it could cause "impairment of [congressional] member communication with constituents."

At press time, @ThomasDotGov has 5,508 followers on Twitter, now that I added one by following it myself. The account was created just three months ago.

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.

"It's a pilot," said John Davidow to Justin Ellis of the Nieman Journalism Lab. "It's now a reality and off the white board. More and more issues will come forward."

It is more than the equivalent of traffic camera in a courtroom though. Judges have access to the stream from their benches and certain topics, like restraining orders, will not be lived streamed.

The use case is straightforward. Educate the community in the court process, keep people informed of what is happening in their area, increase awareness of how courts work and provide an open and transparent look into the machinations of an important government entity.

It could also be used as a tool for journalists. It was designed by journalists (WBUR is associated with the College of Communications at BU) and the Knight Foundation is a non-profit group with the aim of advancing journalism in the digital era. Live streaming cameras in local courtrooms can help newsrooms stretched thin of reporters. For instance, the Quincy Patriot-Ledger embedded an OpenCourt stream in an article the day after the service launched.

"I'd argue that nothing compares to actually being there and seeing with your own eyes," Davidow said to Ellis. "At the same time, maybe some news organizations would find efficiency in that setup."

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.

"The Sunlight Foundation will continue to work with you explore how to enhance our democracy and citizen engagement with our public officials using online tools," wrote executive director and co-founder Ellen Miller. "Sure, there's a lot more to be done. As a wise person once said, if this was easy, it would have been done already. And we promise you - the best is yet to come!"

The Sunglight Foundation put together a YouTube video to celebrate its fifth year. Check it out below.

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

FreeBalance is a Canadian company that provides software for public financial management, including online portals for government customers include the United States, Afghanistan, Uganda and Iraq.

On its website, the government of Timor-Leste declared the goal of the project:

"The Transparency Website will allow people to participate, in real time and interactively, in the process of the Timor-Leste national budget and to contribute to National Development."

FreeBalance explains the use a Timorese citizen could put the portal.

"Citizens can investigate projects further to view budget transactions to ensure the budget is being spent as intended. This ensures honesty and transparency to improve citizen and investor confidence. The Timor-Leste Transparency Portal provides 10 years of budget information: the budget that was approved and the actual budget spent. Reports and filtered results can be exported in PDF, Word, Excel, XML and HTML formats."

Can such portals provide real transparency? Can transparency itself really make a difference in difficult situations like that in East Timor? Or do so many interests militate against it that the transparency will either not last or never be truly see-through? It's something I don't have an answer for.

If you do, having worked in government or for an NGO on the financial side, please leave a comment below.

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.

Every time there is a major outage, security issue, or malfunction we see this pattern of raised anxiety, doubts, and questioning of services in the cloud in general.

This makes perfect sense of course, as Web apps and Web services have become more prevalent and are now an essential part of our daily habits and work. The advantage of Web apps is compelling: simply grab a PC, iPad, laptop or mobile phone and you have everything at your fingertips. But there is a downside too: we become dependent on the cloud infrastructure and our connectivity to the network.

The reality is that software and services break. Desktop software normally breaks with one user at a time, although millions will be affected over time. If a Web app breaks however, hundreds of thousands are affected at the same time. There is also a psychological effect: when software on a computer fails, people often feel (partly) responsible for it. With Web apps, the provider is the only one to blame.

So even if Web apps are far more reliable than local apps - and I believe this is often the case - the public outcry is far more extensive. Especially now, when typing "#fail" on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, is only seconds away.

What does this imply for the companies behind the Web apps we use every day? The single most important thing is to have the communication channels in place well before a 'crisis' strikes.

I personally suggest having the following at minimum:

1. A blog or status page that is hosted independent (and scalable!) from the main website and services. Easy, predictable, standard names should be used: blog.company-or-brand.com and status.company-or-brand.com, respectively. A good example: status.readwriteweb.com. Preferably these pages should include up-to-date, live, stats.
2. A Twitter name where one can post quick updates. If possible @company-or-brand should be used here too. Example: @rww.

This first level of transparency makes it easy for people to get informed and immediately results in lower anxiety levels. This in turn, helps to stamp out rogue stories in times of crisis, and reduces the load on the company's customer service contact center.

Many companies have set up public status pages already.

Next, when an outage or other crisis starts unfolding, these companies should make sure to cover the next points:

• Admit failure as soon as possible, preferably by someone high up in the organization
• Make sure the posts and updates sound human, no standard sound bites
• Explain in detail who and what is affected (which regions, percentage of customers, what services, etc.)
• Publish a detailed timeline of the outage, and start maintaining this immediately after the first event
• Share detailed post mortem reports and lessons learned after the crisis is over
• Read more here for a more detailed analysis of the psychology of transparency

If these guidelines are followed, the added benefit is that it actually induces and instills a higher trust in the company and its brand - not less. It also gets the message across quickly and efficiently, so it can then be relayed across social networks, instead of leaving it up to the guesses of the public or the media. Finally, it will save serious money in the company's contact center, as it sets the right expectations.

Companies that are transparent about issues regarding their services will actually gain kudos and trust.

So the next time there is an issue with your favorite application on the Web and www.your-favorite-app.com is not working: you might want to check out status.your-favorite-app.com to see if there is up-to-date information before you type "#fail". A Public Status Page may just be waiting for you there.

Stan P. van de Burgt is CEO and co-founder of WatchMouse, a company that monitors websites and services 24x7 from over 50 locations worldwide and delivers detailed insight about their performance, uptime, and functionality. Inspired by the dashboards of Amazon and Google, WatchMouse introduced Public Status Pages (PSP) in early 2010. Companies like Twitter, Mozilla, WordPress, and many more use this product to be even more transparent to their customers, users and developers.

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.

Rep. Mike Doyle (R-PA) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act into the House on April 15. An identical Senate version of the bill was introduced by Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX). Bi-partisan support for public access to federal research has been growing.

The bills propose specifically that the 11 federal agencies with research budgets of $100 million or greater make the published results of their research free to the public.

Knowledge is (Economic) Power

If these 11 massive agencies suddenly were required to make their research public (with a governmental value of suddenly), it could possibly act as a shot of adrenaline to the private sector. Who knows what products and services might be launched, or improved, on the back of this research? It could result in a significant leap forward for an economy that seems at times terminally stalled.

Presumably, the government already has the research that they've paid for. (Presumably.) But a public in possession of that information might make for a much less patient public. If a government agency, for instance, knows something that could improve its services, but allows bureaucratic foot-dragging or inter-agency squabbling to slow its implementation, that agency would find itself in, let's say, a compromised position politically when an informed public realized what it was doing.

Having been in a position to listen and talk to career bureaucrats facing change, we are not as sanguine as we could be at the news. It would be surprising indeed if half the people responsible for sharing this information with the pubic didn't go limp at the first approach of torch-wielding villagers at their castle door. To work, this bill will require that the chief executive make it known in no uncertain terms that any agency head with a hitch in his gitalong will shortly thereafter find himself on the street in the company of all his closest advisors.

"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."

"BurstNET determined that the posted material, in addition to potentially inciting dangerous activities, specifically violated the BurstNET Acceptable Use Policy. This policy strictly prohibits the posting of 'terrorist propaganda, racist material, or bomb/weapon instructions.' Due to this violation and the fact that the site had a history of previous abuse, BurstNET elected to immediately disable the system."

Presumably the "previous abuse" was of copyright violations, which the owner said was dealt with in a timely fashion.

The fairness of shutting down the 69,999 blogs that were innocent for the one that may prove guilty, is up for debate. We have questions in to the company and will post any response if we receive one.

Thanks to Jeremy for the tip.

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."

"(I) got C&D letters from copyright owners to remove pages with links to torrent/rapidshare. I always handle such abuse reports within 24 hours and remove such material."

BurstNET responded that "this was not a typical case, in which suspension and notification would be the norm." A spokesperson for the company later told CNET that this case had nothing to do with copyright violations.

On the discussion board, a BurstNET representative subsequently said:

"Simply put: We cannot give him his data nor can we provide any other details. By stating this, most would recognize that something serious is afoot...This is the last post we will make on this subject."

As things currently stand:

• 70,000 people have been cut off from their blogs
• The law enforcement agency involved has not been identified
• The alleged wrongdoing on the part of the platform has not been made public

That "something serious is afoot" is a description, not an explanation. Keeping this sort of thing private may be warranted, at least when it comes to the details. But the sensible thing for this unnamed agency to do, if in fact it exists and is an actor in this drama, would be for it to issue an official statement with at least some verifiable information in it.

URL blocked graphic by Wesley Fryer

And in the interest of transparency, I should disclose that I thought about slipping my Amazon affiliate code into those links, but decided not to.

I submit all of this in support of a theory of mine: that the future of corporate communications lies in boring audiences into submission through sheer information overload. Radical transparency and tactical transparency, you've met your match: tedious transparency.

Feel free to try it out in the comments below.

More Noise to Signal.

The innovative system is a pleasure to use and is being open sourced for other organizations interested in crowdsourcing similar tasks. You can honestly do something useful and important in 5 minutes or less on this site.

TransparencyCorps participants get points for every small task they do and can get themselves on a charming leader board of "transparency leaders." It's all very cute but this really is important work to be done.

We'd love to see an iPhone app to do this kind of work while waiting for the bus or in the line at the grocery store. How about a Facebook app that pushes out notifications to our friends' newsfeeds: "I just took 2 minutes and summarized a congressional earmark request to fund an environmental study of a proposed industrial park!"

Unlike Mechanical Turk, where there are scads of workers because they get paid small sums, TransparencyCorps volunteers are unpaid. Promotion will no doubt be the site's biggest challenge. If ease of use can be maximized and some effective promotion done, we think this could be a really great project.

Here, we caught up with John C. Havens of BlogTalkRadio, and he shared insights from his recently released book, Tactical Transparency. Sometimes, a filter on honest sharing in social media can benefit everyone involved, particularly where brands are concerned.

The book, a collaboration with PR oldtimer Shel Holtz, involved years of work and dozens of interviews with social media leaders. All the interviews are available as audio downloads on this BlogTalkRadio page, as well.

For more real-world insights that work, check out the Internet Oldtimers Foundation site. Also, we've uploaded a few pics from the delightful event on Flickr.

On the day the Presidency changed hands the White House made a blog post that included a promise that all non-emergency legislation would be posted online for five days before the President signed it into law so as to "allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it." That hasn't happened so far; Obama has signed 11 bills into law and only 1 spent 5 days online between Congress and his office. Now some observers say it doesn't matter and that it was a wrongheaded promise in the first place.

Harper summarized his findings as such:

Of the eleven bills President Obama has signed, only six have been posted on Whitehouse.gov. None have been posted for a full five days after presentment from Congress.

One bill, the DTV Delay Act, was posted after it was cleared for presentment by Congress February 4th, with the President signing it February 11th. This arguably satisfies the five-day promise, though presentment - a constitutional step in the legislative process - would be a better time to start the five-day clock. (Congress presented it February 9th.)

Several times the White House has posted a bill while it remains in Congress, attempting to satisfy the five-day rule. But this doesn't give the public an opportunity to review the final legislation - especially any last minute amendments. Versions of the children's health insurance legislation, the omnibus spending bill, and the omnibus public land management bill were linked to from Whitehouse.gov while making their ways through Congress, but not posted in final form.

Does This Matter?

The Sunlight Foundation's Paul Blumenthal points to a Google Groups discussion where Cato's Harper discusses his findings with prominent NYU Professor Clay Shirky and others.

Shirky argues there that posting legislation online for 5 days between Congress approving it and the President signing it is of very limited utility. He says in fact that transparency would be more appropriately applied to bills while they are in Congress, and the 5-day promise of posting before the President signs bills did more harm than good.

...the place the Founders decided to host most of the "system gaming" is in Congress, where factions are to be contained, to contend with the construction of legislation before it goes to the White House.

That's where legislative transparency might make a difference. I think the Obama promise was meant to model the appropriate attitude towards transparency, but I'm willing to bet that they've made implementing useful (read: legislative) transparency harder, because they've tried to demonstrate its efficacy in a place and manner that won't produce many good outcomes, and it will be hard to extrapolate from that to the idea that transparency will be good elsewhere in the system.

In response Harper writes that legislators would be much more cautious about throwing in last minute wasteful spending if they knew their work was going to sit out in the light of day for 5 days before it got signed. He also argues that it's important to hold the President to his campaign promises.

What do you think? Is it important that legislation be posted on the web for 5 days between when it's completed by Congress and when it's signed by the President? It's one thing to applaud Obama's use of the web and historic stance of transparency, but when it comes down to brass tacks - there are tactical decisions that need to be thought through. Presumably there are some things about using the web from the White House that the new administration is going to learn on the fly. Making a promise to take a particular step and not doing it at all doesn't seem good though, and arguments like Shirky's could have been foreseen before the promise was made.

Check Your Own Connection

For now, Google has made three tools available to users that are running on the company's servers in Mountain View. A basic networks diagnostic tool lets you test your connection speed, while the aptly named Glasnost checks if your BitTorrent transfers are being blocked or throttled. A network path and application diagnosis tool allows you to run some basic, low-level diagnostics on your broadband connections.

Google will also soon host DiffProbe and NANO, two tools that are especially geared towards examining whether an ISP is selectively degrading performance for a subset of users or a certain application. DiffProbe can also examine whether an ISP is giving priority to certain kinds of traffic.

The data gathered by Measurement Lab initiative will be made public.

Google and Net Neutrality

These tools, of course, are not new (Google is just hosting them for the researchers), but it is interesting that Google is putting its weight behind these efforts through the Measurement Lab. In the announcement, Google doesn't directly take sides on the net neutrality issue, but instead, the announcement refers to the importance of keeping Internet users "well-informed about what they're getting when they sign up for broadband." It is also interesting to note that the announcement on the Google Blog was coauthored by Vint Cerf, the "father of the Internet" and Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, which puts even more weight behind the importance of this initiative for Google and the message the company wants to send by supporting this project.

For the first time in three years, net neutrality will once again be discussed by the U.S. House of Representatives today, so it seems safe to assume that this announcement was timed to coincide with this.

Validas is ideal for the SMB (Small Medium Business) market. That includes all the bootstrapping Gritty Entrepreneurs as well as the VC funded start-ups that just got the "cut costs" memo from their pals at the VC fund. But it is also the 27 million Small Medium Businesses that employ 50% of Americans.

Validas can be used by a consumer. But an individual can probably spend a few minutes and figure it out themselves.

Nor is Validas ideal for Fortune 500. They can get the data from the carriers in a form that they can analyze any way they want, they can employ people to haggle with the carriers and have the clout to get results.

What if you are the CEO with 20 employees? You have other priorities. You can tell your Admin/Finance person to do it, but maybe his priority should be chasing receivables? You can tell all 20 of your people to figure out how to reduce all their cell phone bills? Well, if you are the kind of CEO that sprays employees with constant priorities that all get ignored, you could employ consultants to do it, but their fees might outweigh the savings.

Automating A Small Boring Job

Validas does what you would do if you took the trouble or if you employed somebody to do it. They just automate it, so they can do it fast and efficiently and thus make money in the process.

This is boring and it is small. So it should be really easy. It should fit into that quadrant that is Minor Impact/Easy To Do.

That is easy to say, but hard to pull off. Validas has the experience to deliver this. The founders, Tom Pepe and Todd Dunphy, left their safe jobs at Verizon Wireless to start Validas. They know all the tricks that carriers use to get those extra fees.

How It Works

To use Validas, you will need to be set up for online billing. Online billing is free from your carrier and you do not need to cancel your paper bill to use Validas. You can use Validas for bills from: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, and US Cellular.

Then you upload to Validas and view your potential savings. You can download this information into Excel or print out the reports.

Validas claims that the Current Average Yearly Savings Per Customer = $505. Presumably that is not per user and is for a small business of some type.

Validas pricing is simple, with various plans. The one they promote as best value costs $24 for 24 reports, audited every month. So that would work for a 24 person company. You can test it out with a $5 One Time Audit.

Validas fits the trend we are seeing of a return to simple "every day low prices" rather than fancy Freemium models supported by advertising. If it has value, charge for it.

The End Of Information Asymmetry

Validas looks like it is part of a big trend towards transparency, the end of "information asymmetry" that we noted in our Ten Trends To Bet On For Your Most Audacious Start-Up. We have seen start-ups doing this well in the car market. We suspect we will see more in financial services. In all cases, the start-up takes the side of the small buyer to get better deals from a large seller. Validas is a welcome entrant in the cell phone market.

But what about now? This is the time to be audacious. The world has changed, totally and irrevocably. Change is the entrepreneur's friend.

I call these Micro Trends. They are not the big obvious trends that everybody is riding - such as mobile, online advertising, search, social networking, globalization etc. If you spotted those 10 years ago, great. Now it is too late. Think surfing. If you see the wave building early on, you get a chance to ride it. If you catch it too late, you get crushed.

How Does The Last Few Weeks Change This List?

For some time I have had a list of Micro Trends on my personal blog. It seems a good time to revisit them to see what might change based on the global credit crisis.

1. Transparency. This wave has been building for a while, but it just got a big boost by recent events. Transparency in financial markets obviously. Then there is Obama's Google for Government initiative. Some of the smartest recent startups we have seen use a mix of technology, insight and hard work to expose the inner working of industries to eliminate information asymmetry and get lower prices for buyers. You can bet that there will be more.

2. Relocalization. We have already written about this here. Tough times will accentuate this trend. The solutions are not obvious (so Momentum VC won't touch them), they could be game changing.

3. Reduced power of gatekeepers. This relates to Transparency. Reduced information asymmetry reduces the power of gatekepeepers/intermediaries/tollbooths. The Financial Services industry is the mother of all gatekeepers. The Economist states that in the early 1980s, the financial services industry accounted for 10% of GDP, but last year it rose to 40%. One change arising from the recent turmoil we can be totally confident about is that the current financial services intermediaries are weakened and new models will arise. Who will do a craigslist on the financial services industry (or at least segments of that vast industry)?

4. Micro-trend Slopes replace Chasms. Alex Iskold started an interesting conversation about whether the Internet has made the Chasm adoption model less relevant. Biking up and down slopes may be the better analogy today. Catch a new trend and you can cruise down a slope, picking up speed effortlessly. As trend-spotting me-too ventures join the race (the Internet spreads ideas instantaneously) the slope flattens out and curves uphill. In good times, a bit of pushing gets you over the top and catching another micro trend slope on the way down. If your up slope coincides with a cyclical down turn (and we are certainly in a big cyclical downturn today), you will get a flat tire and have to carry your bike up the hill and mend it at the top. Don't worry, the other racers will have given up at that point. Starting in a cyclical downturn, make sure you are on a down slope!

5. Changing balance of power between big and small businesses. Yes we have been "banging on" about this for a long time. For the most long-winded description (sorry), read this. This could be the biggest micro trend, even a Tsunami that few people have spotted. Which the current crisis just accentuated. Which the incoming President might actually do something positive about for a change.

6. Self-organizing networks beat command and control structures. This is the story of Enterprise 2.0 - aka, social media meets the enterprise.

7. The end of mass markets. This relates to most of the other trends. Small, niche, specialist will beat mass produced. This is why Etsy may be a big winner from this Web 2.0 cycle. There are probably other opportunities around this trend.

8. Ad $$$ will flow to measurable ROI models. OK, that falls into the no-duh category! But surely Google Adwords is not the only winner in this category? There must be a better ad targeting model out there somewhere? Not better search, you can just use Yahoo Boss for search - that game was totally over well before the credit crisis. But better ad targeting that does not infringe privacy is a big winner.

9. Bubbles will form and pop faster. Bubbles are like booze. With a horrible hangover we say "never again". But guess what.... They don't reappear in the same place until a generation that was bruised has moved on. So the big bubble may be a thing of the past. But we will get lots of small ones. That is kind of like moderate drinking, actually quite good for us. My motto is "moderation in all things, including moderation".

10. The end of 11 point lists. I used to do 10 point lists until a commenter showed me this wonderful Spinal Tap video. Seriously, 10 point lists indicated limits and space on the Internet is unlimited. But then I noticed many people doing 11 point lists. In the spirit of back to basics discipline, 10 point lists will make a comeback.

Image credit: Thomas Hawk

See also: What's Next After Web 2.0