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Oct

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How an Ohio bill really becomes a law


Well, we don’t quite know every single time. But there are a lot of ways to collect info on what’s happening to anyone initiative.

Contacting your state legislators is always a good start (state senators here, representatives here). If you don’t know who your senator or rep is, you can find out here for reps and here for senators.

And following it in the blogs, through blog comments and via feeds from newspapers (and the blogs) is also a good way. Google Alerts will tell you anytime a particular phrase – such as a bill number – comes up. And Technorati has “watchlists” that let you follow blogs. There’s always search tools for blogs only (like Google’s blog search). And then there are aggregators like Lefty Blogs for Ohio and Blog Net News for Ohio. I don’t know if SOB Alliance is really considered an aggregator for the righty blogs but it’s a good resource for them anyway. There are gobs more of tools – these are just some of the ones I use.

Now, there are also some sites like BillHop.com which also can help you follow a bill but they are only as good as the input and the one in Ohio I don’t think has really taken off.

I keep track of a lot of the info via Bloglines, which is what’s called an aggregator or feed reader (I think that’s what it’s called – that’s what I call it anyway). What you do is, you sign up for Bloglines and then, when you’re on a site you want to follow, look for the little orange square with some curved white lines on it on the righthand side of the URL address line at the top of your screen. If you click on it, it will ask you if you want to subscribe and the process should be more or less automatic once you’ve signed up with Bloglines. A lot of people use Google Reader too but I haven’t gotten very comfortable with that one. And there are many more out there. I’ve also probably skipped a bunch of interim steps, but the instructions are almost always easy to follow – even if, like me, you don’t quite understand what you’re doing as you do it. Kind of sounds like life.

Anyway, I fear that I’m outgrowing the wonkabee moniker I’ve applied to myself for the last couple of years by confessing that I use these different methods for following what’s going on in the Ohio statehouse. Except that I know that there are other folks who will always out-wonk me.

If you want to see an example of how this following stuff works, read more here.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 12:35 pm October 2nd, 2007 in Blogging, Ohio, Resources, Statehouse, Tech, Tools 

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One Response to “How an Ohio bill really becomes a law”

  1. 1 Save journalism, become a blogger says Howard Owens | Writes Like She Talks on October 3rd, 2007 1:05 pm

    [...] this post sound prophetic, IMO. function toggleview(element1) { var element1 = [...]

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