There are a bunch of great blogposts this morning on what we’re calling the Exposing Earmarks project. Here are just a few…

You must visit NZ Bear’s great Porkbusters webpage on the earmarks. It has visual views of state-by-state earmarks, dollars per capita, and even dollars per keyword. Brilliant. (NZ also gave extremely helpful advice on the design of our google map of earmarks).

Captain Ed writes:

Let’s see how the viral network of the blogosphere can work. Find the most outrageous pork-barrel items in the HHS budget and post them in comments here. I’ll put some together and post about them here and at Heritage to keep everyone informed about the ridiculous manner in which Congress spends our money.

One caveat: I already found the three million dollars that went to the Charles B Rangel Center for Public Service. That one’s mine. Go find yours now!

Mark Tapscott writes:

I believe this is the first-ever such citizen journalism project and it certainly is among the largest-ever efforts in the Blogosphere to focus the power of viral networking – aka called by James Suroweicki as “The Wisdom of Crowds” – in a demonstration of individual empowerment that Reynolds describes in his book, “An Army of Davids.” The emergence of such citizen journalism projects was predicted years ago by Dan Gillmor in his book “We the Media.”

The aspiration is big — we certainly need all the viral help and ideas we can find to meet our goals. Please link to these sites, take the data and remash it, ask your own blog community to join. Thanks.