We have had about 200k visitors so far in 2016, and they’ve come looking for a wide variety topics, bills, and legislators. We here at Political Eye Candy like to take an occasional look at what people are looking for and share it with you. This time we even have a little twist for you.
First, let’s look at what people have been searching for with our free quick search box. Here’s the top 50 or so search terms so far this year:
In the beginning of every semester, so in this case January, we tend to get a flood of nursing ethics students, explaining some of these terms. Welcome nursing students! Best wishes to you in your efforts to be ethical!
This quarter I’ve decided to also take a look at what search terms are being used for bill sheets. Bill sheets are our saved searches, where you can set up alerts to keep yourself updated, or widgets to keep other informed. In other words, these search terms are what topics are of interest to our paying customers:
I’m finding it interesting to compare and contrast these two word clouds (speaking of word clouds, thank you, as always, to Wordle). From a comparing point of view, marijuana jumps out as a topic quite interesting to both citizens and professionals. Contrasting, keeping in mind this is in no way a random scientific sample, I’m interested in what a large proportion of our customers care about education, compared to our free users, even though many of our free users are students. I do know that our customers are coming at education from all different points of view, from universities themselves, to people tracking appropriations, to groups with opinions about common core, to school boards, to people looking to require certain qualifications in their field, and on and on. Education comes into play pretty often, really.
To wrap up, here’s the top 5 bills read since the beginning of 2016:
- AL HB365: Criminal sex offenders over age 21, sex offenses against child 12 years of age or younger, surgical castration required prior to release from custody of Corrections Department
- OK SB1323: Schools; directing the withholding of State Aid if a Board of Education adopts certain policy and receives certain complaint. Effective date. Emergency.
- OK HB3044: Schools; prohibiting certain referrals or providing information to students without notifying parents or guardians; effective date; emergency.
- OK SB973: Marriage; Preservation of Sovereignty and Marriage Act. Emergency.
- MS HB58: School term; revise to prohibit beginning before last Monday in August.
And here’s the top 5 legislators viewed since the beginning of 2016:
- Joshua C. Brecheen – (R) Oklahoma
- Joseph F. Vitale – (D) New Jersey
- Heather Scott – (R) Idaho
- Katherine Prudhomme-O’Brien – (R) New Hampshire
- Toni G. Atkins – (D) California
About BillTrack50 – BillTrack50 is a user friendly free service that provides legislation research in all 50 states and federally. BillTrack50 also offers legislation and regulation tracking across the nation with tools to help organization stay on top of changes (bill sheets and alerts) and share legislation they are tracking with key stakeholders (legislator scorecards, widgets and stakeholder pages). If you are interested in learning more about how BillTrack50 saves organizations time and money, sign up for a demo and try it out BillTrack50 Pro for a month, for free.