My mind is swimming with all I have learned at IRE. And I have a lot of apps, programs, websites to check out and tell you more about over the coming months. Here are some of the top quick points from what I’ve heard:
1. Track key words in legislation at your state house and get alerts for those keywords via openstates.org
2. Sunlight Foundation, which runs #1 above, also has many websites to help you follow politics, track influencers of politics and even find deleted tweets from pols. For a list of all of them check out the Tools tab.
3. Three ways to verify a photo — use the camera icon at Google images and drag the photo in to see where it appears online; do the same on tineye.com or click on the photo settings and get the EXIF data which has latitude and longitude which you can put in Google maps.
4. New to an area and want some quick demographics to help you understand that neighborhood or city? Download the sitegeist app.
5. You could spend days looking at all the business and economic data provided by the St. Louis Federal Reserve. It’s called FRED.