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Whether you're a political junkie, student or it’s part of your job as a reporter, lawyer, lobbyist, corporate executive or government staffer to follow Congress, FedNet has a new service to make it even easier to keep up with what's happening on the Senate and House floors. Called FedNet ALERT, the system monitors every moment of debate and then automatically e-mails video and text of speeches related to pre-selected keywords by subscribers to their desktop, BlackBerry or other handheld device once a result has been detected.

The idea is to empower users to see what members of Congress are saying about a topic shortly after the words are spoken, according to FedNet. Whatever issue a subscriber chooses to track (Ethanol, Immigration, Stem Cell, Net Neutrality, Agriculture etc.) the service will reference the entire video clip and text related to it immediately.

Keywords, member names, bill numbers, even votes can be monitored 24/7 with FedNet ALERT. Users enter up to five keywords and five associated wildcards to monitor. A keyword might be "General Electric", where the wildcard would be the initials "GE," for example.

" Up to now, there has been no way to effectively monitor what has been said that same day," asserted Keith Carney, President & CEO of FedNet. "This groundbreaking FedNet ALERT service provides the only way to effectively and affordably monitor this great institution and have the information delivered to you."

The FedNet ALERT service starts at $50 a month.

FedNet, around since 1994, started offering searchable access to congressional debates with its reCap video service in 2002. It now has over 2 million video records and nearly 9000 hours of floor debate in its database.