By the title of this post, I don’t mean that the U.S. Senate will vote by using XML. I mean that the U.S. Senate is making it’s past votes, its voting history, available in XML format. Read here for more information. Imagine the mashup possibilities here. They could be hysterical.
Bloggers, on both sides of the political spectrum, will finally be able to rehash and mash up votes with other media to get those votes to turn out they way they want them. Votes mashed up with Google maps, and podcasts, and videos, and Flickr pix. Ones-sided votes, over-sided votes, landslides, mandates; all these things will come to pass on many different blogs, all of them different and all with the same voting records. Sort of like The Daily Show, but on a micro basis. This could be hysterical. It could also be confusing.
Imagine a million blogs, many of them not satire or parody sites, suddenly getting in the business of trying to be funny. Dipping an untrained toe into the waters of parody and satire. Mashing and hashing and rewriting “history” with their own version of Senate votes. And combine that with the slow, but sure, demise of the central “repositories of reality,” i.e. mainstream newspapers. Then what might we have. More people who are more confused than they already are?
This is going to be funny, or sad. I’ll let you know which later.
