A widget and XML for tracking presidential campaign fundraising

Maplight.org today released a widget "that allow anyone to track presidential fundraising on their own blogs, social media sites, and personal Web sites. " The widget is a customizable bar chart showing amounts raised by each candidate. The site, devoted to exposing the relationship between money and politics, also unveiled an API -- application programming interface -- "that makes it easy for any Web developer to build their own site or software program that displays or shares up-to-date campaign contributions from the FEC. " The API returns XML summarizing contributions for one or more candidates. All this is free and open source. Maplight's uniqueness is that it doesn't just provide campaign finance data -- it relates that data to actual votes, showing the correlations between the two. Here's a screencast that shows how the site works. Right now it has data for U.S. Congress and California legislators, and plans to expand to include the ten most populous states. Maplight, incidentally, received a grant from the aforementioned Sunlight Foundation.