I'm pleased to have played a small part in helping our friends at the Sunlight Foundation pull together this nifty piece of 3-D (Dynamic, Data-Driven) journalism on the Wall Street bailout: a Google Motion Chart built on top of data from the nonpartisan, invaluable Center for Responsive Politics that lets you see just how big the big money from FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) has grown in the last 20 years, and who gets it. Trust me, this is cool.

Here's the archived video of the "Transparency and Government" session at the Berkman at 10 conference that I participated in along with Sunlight Foundation head Ellen Miller this morning. (I am a consultant to Sunlight.) It was streamed live to the web by uber-video blogger Steve Garfield, who is the official videographer of the event.

Is the Internet good for democracy, or not? John Palfrey is up leading a distributed conversation on that topic for the second plenary session. I'm going to take notes on the conversation, but as always treat these as paraphrases at best.

Confronted by the prospect of internet-driven public participation in crafting legislation, the past head of the American League of Lobbyists says, "What's next? Are we going to let the American people decide our defense policy, our trade policy, our immigration policy?"

I'm at the National Press Club for the launch of Stanford Prof. Larry Lessig's new project, Change-Congress.org. He's here as part of Sunshine Week, and his speech is co-sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation (which I consult for) as well as the Omidyar Network. As you may know, last year, Lessig decided to shift his focus from the fight for free culture to the fight for a clean government. Here are my notes on his talk, paraphrasing as best as I can...

Last week at ETech, one of my favorite tech conferences, three Brits convened a delightful panel on "moving theft-based activism to the global stage." The title actually made the discussion sound a bit illicit, when really all the three were talking about was how civic-minded hackers have being taking government data that ought to be in public view, and making it available to all--with transformative and beneficial effects.

A MySpace poll of their users claims that young people are perhaps more politically engaged than older generations; WaPo profiles John McCain, makes another tag cloud; the Slashdot community interviews Garrett Graff, chaos ensues; notes from the annals of e-democracy; results from the first National Presidential Caucus; the National Journal's Technology is closing up shop; a new Politico column from Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry looks at the Republicans and tech; and a new site from Bill Richardson might be the gloomiest thing ever.

We have so much fun picking out our favorite web videos every week, we thought we'd try something new with our video experiments. In this, our third techPresidentTV video, I look through a handful of our favorite web videos of the last week (we also wrote about them here).

We're still experimenting with our video efforts, so let us know what you think!

Video after the jump...

It's that time again, when we present our favorite political videos of the week. Some have gone or will go viral, and some will fall by the wayside. But all of them hit some kind of political or cultural note that proves the ever-increasing influence of online video. Sometimes videos come from the ground up and grab the mainstream media’s attention, like the video of University of Florida student Andrew Meyer getting tasered. But sometimes a video comes from big media first, like Sally Field getting cut off by Fox as she gave an anti-war speech at the Emmys.

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani and his critics continue to fight via video, a Ron Paul supporter goes over top with a video in support of the Texan candidate, and there’s much love for the intertubes.

Have a favorite video? Send it to us at techpres AT personaldemocracy DOT com.

It's OneWebDay on Saturday. C'mon Trippi, Rospars, Daou, Finn, Turk, Tagaris, Carbone, Guerra, Ruszkowski, Phong, Wolf, Harbath, Fedewa, Tabor, Ferry, Lam, Lowen, and Jewell. Whaddya got?