Last week, the Institute on Money in State Politics annouced the launch of their APIs that give outside Web developers the ability to access and display the Institute’s data on their own Web sites, to program fully interactive displays using Institute data within their Web pages, and to create applications that return live data from FollowTheMoney.org.

The first group to jump into using APIs is Project Vote Smart. Here’s what it looks like on the Project Vote Smart Web site.

I just got a very encouraging update from Ed Bender, IMSP’s Director:

The API Mike built for Project Vote Smart is up and running. As of this morning, it has already logged 17,581 calls for data from the PVS site. Not bad for a few days of activity. In addition, the Pew-funded news outlet Stateline.org is programming an API to correspond to its ballot-measure work. Sunlight Labs is working on an API that will draw data from both our site and CRP’s. Newspapers logging on for an API password include: The Albuquerque Journal, The Olympian in Washington state, the Seattle PI, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, the New York Times, The Anniston Star and the Los Angeles Times. A couple of bloggers have logged in as has an activists with the Hawaii Clean Elections campaign.

 

We are very excited about IMSP’s leadership in this arena. Like Ed, we know that this is the wave of the future in how data should be presented on the Web. Kudos to them for taking the lead.

Full disclosure may be in order: Sunlight has funded IMSP’s work in this arena.