The National Conference of State Legislatures website tracks current news by state and topic in each of the state legislatures. Their legislative bill tracking tool is better than many of the states’ own search engines, enabling searches by keywords. A unique feature is the ability to compare, on one page, all appearances of your keywords in bills in all states. The site would be perfect if you could then receive automatic updates by email or in your newsreader.

A free registration is required to save your searches at the site, then return to them later without having to reenter the search terms.

Go to the search page and enter your terms and select “exact phrase”. For example, “identity theft” returns multiple links; selecting 2006 Introduced Identity Theft Legislation takes you to a results page, organized by state, of all matching legislation.

A new site feature, reflecting the application of information tracking technology to state government, is a one page chart that lists the state legislators who have blogs and the legislative sites that offer RSS feeds.

A summary page, Crime Records and Justice Information Sharing, lists 2005 legislative bills on information technology in this field.