Controlling the flow of political information - my system

I've been talking with some other folks who work in politics, and I think we have a common problem.  We all have too much information to consume.  Whether it's tracking a specific issue, managing a candidate's on-line brand or just keeping up with top stories, the flow of information on the web quickly becomes overwhelming.

So, I thought I'd lay out the set-up I've constructed over time to help search out, organize and deliver the information I want/need to read. Hopefully it will help some other folks too.  Some of you may have seen me talk about this at the RightIgnite event back in July.

I'm running it through 3 free web services:

1. Set up Yahoo Pipes to get and pull your information together.

Yahoo Pipes is a little-known service that can help you create, combine and mash-up RSS feeds.  And when you think about all the different things that can be delivered as RSS feeds you start to get an idea of what you can do. 

(note: Pipes can look intimidating but web-savy folks should be able to master the basics in about 10 minutes)

For example, say you wanted to track all the news of "Candidate Smith."  Well, you could set up a Google Alert and get the RSS feed from that.  Then, maybe you'd do a search for "Candidate Smith" on Twitter and grab the RSS feed from that, too.  An RSS feed from a Technorati search would help monitor blogs.  The possibilities are endless. (heck, even stock quotes come in RSS feeds these days)

In Yahoo Pipes, you can easily combine all these feeds into one stream of information and make one master RSS feed.

2. Send it to Tabbloid to make a .pdf and control delivery 

Tabbloid is a free service run by HP.  It takes RSS feeds, converts them to a .pdf and e-mails them to you on a schedule that you control. And it's as easy as can be.  Just enter the address of the master RSS feed you created with Pipes, your e-mail address and when and how often you want it sent to you.

So for our example you may want all the coverage of Candidate Smith sent to your inbox at 5am each morning.  That way, first thing each day, you've got your own newspaper that you can read, forward along and can even print out for the less tech-savy folks at your organization.

Best of all, the titles of each item in a Tabbloid .pdf are links to the original web story in case you want to link back, monitors comments, etc.

Lastly, I set up my own searchable archive of these stories.

3. Forward your .pdf's to Evernote for archiving and searching

Evernote is a pretty powerful service that is great for note-taking, synching, archiving and a million other things.  Here, we're going to use it to make our own private internet.

Go ahead and sign up for a free account with Evernote. Then, when the Tabbloid .pdf's come to your inbox forward them (or better yet, set them to auto-forward) to the e-mail address you'll get from Evernote.  There they can be all stored in one "notebook" and available on from the web, your computer and even your phone.

One of the fantastic things about Evernote is that it can "read" .pdf's.  So when you need to go back and find that story from 2 weeks ago that touted Candidate Smith's principled stance on health care, you can just search "health care" and it will bring up in the original ,pdf from tabbloid.

It's kind of like having your own little internet.

So there it all is.  Yahoo Pipes to Tabbloid to Evernote.

I run this system for a number of topics and have had lots of success with it.  I even post some of the pdf's at my posterous site so others can read and save them.

If you've got any questions or improvement ideas I'd love to hear about them in the comments.