With Congress returning Washington to start a new session,OpenCongress.org just launched several new features to help you track and rate what's happening on Capitol Hill and organize support for the legislation and issues you care about. The first, My OpenCongress http://www.opencongress.org/, is the first-ever social network designed for people who care about Congress. Now, OpenCongress makes it super easy to track any bill, senator, representative or issue area on the site, simply by clicking "track this" at the top of any page. Use your OpenCongress profile to make your voice heard: vote "aye" or "nay" for every bill in Congress, give a personal approval rating to senators and representatives on a scale of 1-100, and see the total votes for each bill and lawmaker.

OpenCongress also launched new comment boards on pages for every bill, senator, and representative on the site. These comment boards allow real-world people to discuss the details of legislation, share links, evaluate political landscapes, and give their opinions. Boards are designed to "filter up" the comments rated "most helpful" by the user community, using a simple slider bar located next to each comment. What's more, each user builds up a site-wide rating for all his or her comments, so there is an incentive for people with helpful insights, expertise, or "insider information" to comment more frequently. To check out these new features, create your own "My OpenCongress" account now, it's free and only take a minute: http://www.opencongress.org/register.

Additionally, just in time for the elections, MAPLight.org http://maplight.org made it easier than ever to track fundraising for over 1,500 congressional candidates running for office with free widgets
http://www.maplight.org/map_fec/widget/congress. These widgets are perfect for blogs, social networking pages, and personal Web sites, and they are completely customizable according to the candidates you are interested in. You can show money raised for one congressional race, view all candidates in your home district or state, view House and Senate races from across the country, in any combination desired.

On a related note, remember you can help our Congresspedia editors 'Wiki the Vote' http://www.congresspedia.org by reporting on the full record of every candidate running for Congress.