Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Influence Explorer

The Sunlight Foundation created the Influence Explorer. "Type in the name of a COMPANY, your LAWMAKER or a prominent INDIVIDUAL, and see how they're influencing the political system." Looking up News Corp is quite surprising.

Now someone's created a bookmarklet called Checking Influence that you can use from your online banking site. "Just add Checking Influence to your bookmarklet bar and then go to any web page that has bank transactions (wherever you do online banking, like your banking site, credit card site, or Mint.com). Then, just click on the Checking Influence bookmarklet in your toolbar. Checking Influence will find the company names in your list of banking transactions and show you the “influence data” for the corporations it can identify — including political campaign contributions and what lobbying the corporation conducted."

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