Fivethirtyeight's 435

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight is working on a fabulous citizen resource that I think is going to take away a lot of the relative anonymity of congressional voting and drive a boom in blogosphere citizen-journalist awareness of Congress. He is working on a cartogram, a kind of map that shows every single congressional district so that voting records will be immediately available. Much more intuitive than listing votes, the map lets you go directly to a single congressperson, if you want to see how your representative stood on an issue, or to have a global sense of the voting around the country. His first iteration of the map along with an explanation of his process in designing it is here.

As you can see, the chart sort of represents a map of the US, distorted a bit by unequal population distribution, but still recognizable. The red and blue represent the Democratic and Republican districts. The balance and distribution of power is clearly visible for those who would philosophize on the state of the nation. I'm guessing that once the map is finalized, little rollover popups will tell the rest of the story. I can't wait.