When an image is worth a thousand words — these apps help you understand what is happening during our election season, found on Read/WriteWeb.

Now you can visualize:

• Political contributions by industry — an interactive visualization from Sunlight Foundation
• Earmarks — which states slip the most pet projects into spending bills (I recommend you have latest javascript)
• The 2008 Presidential Election In The Blogosphere — perspctv’s graphs include CNN polls, news mentions, blogosphere mentions, Twitter mentions, a U.S. electoral map, and Google Trends-based timelines
• Electoral College Prediction Tracker — an interactive, embeddable visualization widget you can use to view predictions from different organizations

Google Book Search has developed new tools and partnerships that promise to make books more discoverable on the Web, whether it is from Google search results, bookstores, publisher and author websites, online library catalogs, or social networks.

Retailers, publishers and anyone with a web site can embed books from the Google Book Search index.

“We are also providing new ways for these sites to display full-text search results from Book Search, and even integrate with social features such as ratings, reviews, and readers’ book collections.  By providing tools that help sites connect readers with books in new and interesting ways, we hope publishers and authors will find even wider audiences for their works,” says Inside Google Book Search.

You will be able to preview online up to 20% of a book’s contents, much as if you had it physically present in your hands, when using partner sites or web sites with the embed code.  But it isn’t just book sellers using these tools.

“It is now possible to preview books—including a huge number of works in the public domain—right from the online catalogs of the University of California and the University of Texas, as well as through OCLC’s WorldCat.org, a service that lets you search across the collections of more than 10,000 local and institutional libraries worldwide.”  Author and publisher sites will find the preview functionality useful as well.

Try the embedded viewer API, which also has a link to the Preview Wizard, a tool built atop of the embedded viewer.

Find out who is currently using the Book Search API here.

More real-time quotes on Google Finance
You can now get both NYSE (as of today) and NASDAQ (as of June 2) free real-time market data via Google Finance.  Search Google or Google Finance, add your stock symbols, and keep the page up to have quotes stream live.

If you add Google Finance to iGoogle, add the Google Finance portfolio gadget and monitor your stocks as they are traded throughout the day.

PDF Search Engine: find, download e-books
You can now search quickly for PDF books using PDF Search Engine.  Some results may show PDFs that are not free.

You can add the PDF search engine to your search engine dropdown menu.

Web 2.0 features are “put to a socially significant use” at OpenCongress, says Read/WriteWeb.

OpenCongress recently inroduced 13 new features, and is designed to make it easy to track activities in the US congress.  If you are at all interested in politics and what’s happening in government, you will appreciate this project of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation.

Use OpenCongress to read news, commentary, and blog buzz, link to bills you are interested in, follow hot topics, share information through Digg, StumbleUpon, etc., and find out what your local members of Congress are doing.  It’s quick and easy to establish an RSS feed.

You can create a personal account with OpenID, and enjoy navigating with “a perfect amount of AJAX.”  Outside news and data is pulled into the site, rated by users and actively discussed.

There are many widgets to choose among, helping you to track trends, bills, and issues in particular areas.  Read/WriteWeb also offers suggestions to OpenCongress on additional useful features they might develop.

Listaculous to-do list
Listaculous is a free, tabbed to-do list manager that you can add to your web page or iGoogle start page.

Keep track of all your tasks and lists in one place — accessible from anywhere on the Web. 

I was happy to add this to my iGoogle page since it seems to be simple and intuitive, as advertised, and I particularly like the tabbed presentation. 

It’s quick and easy to register, log-in, and use from any computer at any location via the web.

Logon to Zoho with your Yahoo or Google ID
It’s easy to get overwhelmed with login account so I was glad to see that popular office productivity suite, Zoho, has removed the need to create a separate account to use their services.  Now you can now log in to any of their products using a Google or Yahoo account. 

Zoho plans to adopt OpenID eventually, but in the meantime they wanted to integrate directly with the most requested third parties.  Their goal is to get users to try Zoho with as little hassle as possible.  They may integrate with others such as Microsoft and Facebook in the future.

Powerset search engine with Wikipedia
Is Powerset  a “natural language” search engine?  Maybe not exactly, but Search Engine Land says it is at least an “understanding engine.”  “Because it actually understands what pages are about, it can extract facts from those pages plus comprehend how those facts — as well as those pages — relate to each other.”

You can use Powerset to search Wikipedia now.  It claims to give you better results than Wikipedia’s or Google’s search because Powerset’s technology has read and understood what every word within Wikipedia actually means. 

I don’t know what your experience will be like, but I read about Powerset a couple of days ago when I was also trying to dig some information out of Wikipedia. 

I had limited knowledge of what terminology the subject might use so was finding it difficult to come up with relevant search terms.  I had already explored using both Google and Wikipedia search engines, and then tried Powerset.  Better results!  Once I found a relevant article, I was able to identify good key words that improved my search results outside of Wikipedia, too.

Google Spreadsheets gadgets
I just decided to use Google Spreadsheets for the first time so I was interested to hear about some new features and improvements, including autocompletes, email notification among collaborators, and a directory of gadgets that can be added.

To add a gadget, click on the “Insert” dropdown and select “Gadget,”  Each gadget can be embedded into web pages or added to iGoogle,

Smartphones will have Flash and Reader
Microsoft will license Adobe Systems’ Flash Lite and Reader LE software for use in future versions of Windows Mobile-based phones the companies announced earlier this week.

Budget-conscious tech gadgets
PC Magazine recommends some favorite “cheapskate” gadgets — fun for $200 or less.  They range from Apple’s wireless keyboard and mouse to a Plantronics Bluetooth handset.

Refine Google Maps searches
Google Maps has added three new search options for refining your search when you find and follow the new “show search options” link near the search box for the drop down menu:

• Locations - Search terms will find only addresses, places of interest or other location names 
• Businesses - Search terms find only businesses
• User-created content - Search terms find maps created by users in Google or anywhere on the web

Meebo Rooms turn into A Web service
Meebo has released an API for its Meebo Rooms that will allow Websites to embed chat functionality in an automated fashion, notes TechCrunch.

Manual embedding of code led to a proliferations of Meebo widgets, but now the process is automated.  As well, the new Meebo Network has been introduced, which will serve ads inside Meebo Rooms across the Web, splitting revenues with the Websites hosting the rooms.

Access to the full APIs and the ad network is by invitation only at this point.  Social networks could use the new APIs to automatically add chat rooms to every group page.

“The power of Meebo Rooms is that they let anyone create live conversations on their site by aggregating people with similar interests from other sites. In fact, it links people between sites,” says Erick Schonfeld.

Amazon buying Audible Inc.
In a move to expand its offerings in the digital space, Amazon announced yesterday that it plans to acquire Audible.com, the “leading online provider of premium digital spoken word audio content, specializing in digital audio editions of books, newspapers and magazines, television and radio programs and original programming.”

Audible offers over 80,000 programs, including audiobooks from well-known authors such as Stephen King, Thomas Friedman, and Jane Austen, and spoken word audio content from sources including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Fresh Air and Charlie Rose.

I just signed up for a free “basic” account with MindMeister, a web based tool for the collaborative, real-time creation of mind maps online. 

Amit at Digital Inspiration noted that the tool “provides some very unique options for capturing and inserting ideas into an existing mind map without having to load the map.” 

You can do this either using the Firefox search box,  where you can type an idea and it will automatically get added as a new node to the default mind map, or use a Windows Vista or iGoogle gadget to capture ideas.  Ideas and notes can be arranged into branches via drag-n-drop.  And if you want to use the tool offline, Google Gears will do the job.

MindMeister says that users can create, manage and share their maps online from anywhere and use integrated Skype calls as an enhancement.  DemoGirl created a screencast showing how MindMeister works, and I suggest you take a look before starting your own mind map.  Unsure about what mind mapping is?  Check out Wikipedia.

As an iGoogle start page user I was interested to try out the Custom iGoogle Skins Gadget I heard about from iLibrarian.  The gadget allows you to choose from a number of existing themes OR to create your own show from a Flickr group.

First you need to get the gadget and “add it now” to your iGoogle page.  From there, try these steps:

• After you add the gadget to your page, expand it by clicking the + sign. 
• Then go to the “rules” tab and select an existing theme from the drop-down list, or if you want to use a Flickr group, select “Feeling Lucky?” 
• Click the green plus sign to add the rule.
• If you decided to “feel lucky” and want to select your own Flickr group instead of the default, you will need its ID number.
• Up at the top of the gadget, click the upside-down triangle and select “Edit Settings.” The sixth option down will give you the opportunity to change the Flickr group ID, this is where you will enter the number for any Flickr group.
• To find the Flickr group ID number go to the group and click on “Join this Group.”  In the URL you will see a number after “id=”
• Enter the ID number in the “edit settings” field and reload your iGoogle page.  Every time you reload the page a new photo from your Flickr group should appear as your iGoogle skin.

Librarians, you might want to get started with the Libraries and Librarians Group.  Be aware that using a custom skin may slow down your load time.

Wiki for free e- and e-audio books, educational information
Librarian Chick has a wiki containing a list of free resources for anyone in a learning mode, and especially students and educators.

Search for free audio books, ebooks, and text books here and visit the Learning Center here.  [via The Distant Librarian]

Pageflakes in education
Pageflakes, a popular start page, has a Teacher Edition which can be used as a practical tool for interaction between teachers and students. 

You can use the Teacher template to put together your own page(s) by adding and deleting “Flakes” that you select from a gallery of choices (see some below).  The page is private until you choose to share it with students and/or colleagues.

Functions include calendars, to-do lists, photo and video links, grade trackers, educational bookmarks and many more. [via LibrarianInBlack]