The list of people who were running for Tom Craddick's job as speaker seemed like it was a mile long just the other day. Now, it's dwindling as more and more candidates get behind relative newcomer Joe Straus, a Republican from San Antonio.

We're continuing to update our interactive Google Map looking at the candidates and the key players. We've converted the icons for the dropped-out candidates to cloudy-sky icons. We've also added a line to each mapped person's detail screen to summarize their role in the race and their most recent status. Rep. Senfronia Thompson, for instance, is still represented by a blue balloon and not a cloudy-sky picture -- we haven't seen anywhere that she's formally backed out of the race -- but we note that she's remarked to the AP that she was "delightfully shocked" that Republicans were backing Straus.

As always, we welcome comments, thoughts and suggestions about our map. And you can embed our map in your own blog or Web site.

Keep up with all the latest news from Texas Watchdog. Fan our page on Facebook, join our group on MySpace, follow us on Twitter, fan us or friend us on Digg and send us links to stories you think we ought to see, join our network on de.licio.us to see what we're bookmarking, and put our RSS feed in your newsreader to get our updates delivered right to your desktop. We're also on NewsVine, tumblr, FriendFeed and YouTube.