The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) took a big step towards becoming more accessible on Friday, with an impressive upgrade of its Electronic Comment Filing System. The new EFCS offers far more searching capability, formatting flexibility, and bookmarking power than ever before. The system offers text searching and RSS conversion, and it makes it easier to comment on proceedings. EFCS 2.0 still doesn't go quite as far as we recommended last year, but it's another example of how the Commission is turning fcc.gov into a true public resource.

Here's a guide to the new goodies, and how you can use them to comment on FCC proceedings and research what's happening at the agency.

Commenting

There was no place to go but up from the old commenting page the FCC offered until Friday (it will still be around for a month or so, we're told). Our favorite part of that old clunker was this caveat for short comments: "If you are entering over 70 characters on one line be sure to press your carriage return to ensure proper line-wrapping."

The new commenting page is well-organized, attractive, and far easier to navigate for both experts and beginners. It allows you to upload one document to multiple proceedings, or many documents to many different proceedings. And it doesn't restrict what kind of document file you can send to the agency like the old system did.

If you just want to lob off a quick rant to the Commission about some ongoing proceeding, the new "hot docket" express page is much easier to navigate. It shows up with a comment link to the agency's hottest issue—its new net neutrality proceeding—right at the top of the page. And lo and behold, if you click that blue "i" icon, it takes you to all the public comments and filings on that issue that have been sent to the FCC over the last thirty days (more about that feature later).

The new system still lacks a searchable proceedings wiki or index to accompany these comment pages. What stumps most newbies is that in order to comment on an active FCC rulemaking, you have to know its docket number. Because the Commission offers no quick guide to available proceedings and their accompanying dockets, that number functions as a gatekeeper, preventing people unfamiliar with the FCC's bureaucratic system from commenting. Still, the new system paves the way for further innovation and change.

Now with text searching

ECFS 2.0 offers a wide variety of ways to follow who is saying what at the FCC. Want to know what everybody filed on any given day? Just go to the "daily filings" calendar feature on the left side of the main page. For example: here's what came in on Friday.

You can format what you see in a variety of ways, changing it from default tabular to expanded form. And you can customize the columns, adding or subtracting fields to simplify your data. Then you can export the results to an Excel file or crank out a PDF history report.

Plus, click any blue "i" iconed comment on your page and it takes you to a nicely formatted PDF embedded within the site. Or if you click the hyperlink it goes to an external PDF. And the page allows you to easily jump from the newest through the oldest comments of the day via the last hyperlink at the top of the page.

All these formatting options are available via ECFS 2.0's new file search page and its proceedings search page. The file search page defaults to all submissions for the current day, a feature that some users may experience as an annoyance. But a link option at the top of the page allows you to clear this restriction.

The really big change, though, is that, for the first time, you can now do keyword/text searches on FCC documents via the sites' new Java Server Pages app. According to the Commission, which demonstrated the new system at a public forum on Friday, its programmers have converted "every single filing to image plus text all the way back to 1992."

Only extensive use will show how successful they were. But we did a vanity search and quickly located over 150 filings that reference Ars Technica stories, so we're convinced the system is in good working order.

Bookmarking

The second major breakthrough is that you can now turn these links into bookmarkable RSS feeds. For example, go to search for proceedings, type in the agency's net neutrality docket number (07-52) and hit that yellow search button at the bottom of the page. From the results page, access that RSS feed link on the upper right, and voila!, you've got an RSS feed that you can read from the browser of your choice, or set up an RSS widget on your blog.

If the results are a bit overwhelming, don't forget to use the "exclude brief comments" checkbox option on the filing or proceedings search page. It looks like you can't set up RSS feeds from text searches yet, however.

There's still more work to be done to make FCC activity more discoverable and therefore respondable. This system only searches for docketed filings—that is to say filings associated with FCC proceedings. Petitions for rulemaking that haven't been assigned docket numbers, indecency complaints, and filings in response to enforcement actions aren't part of this system, as far as we can tell.

It would also be helpful if the agency more uniformly explained under what circumstances comments posted at its various new discussion sites like blogband.gov and openinternet.gov count as formal comments submitted to the Commission. The ones at blogband.gov don't, it seems, while the comments at openinternet.gov do? At this point, if you want to be sure your feedback gets into the official record, it's best to file it with ECFS 2.0.

One thing is for sure. The new setup goes a long way towards making what the FCC does far more accessible and transparent. That's good for the concerned public. It's also good for credibility of the FCC, which demands accessibility and transparency from the industries it regulates.