I live in Lexington, Massachusetts, so the idea of rallying the citizens to a grave danger is never far from my doorstep. In fact, “Paul Revere” rode by my house on Monday. Just as in 1775, political action is triggered as a reaction to news events. Only now you don’t have to ride into the night to spread the word. Google Alerts can keep you aware of news events related to your issues anywhere in the world, and give you the ammunition you need to get people fired up to act. Here is a simple procedure for political organizing through Google News Alerts:
1. Create a Google News Alert for your cause. If it is best described in multiple words, such as climate change, put them in quotes to make sure Google finds that exact phrase.
2. Improve the alert to notify you of events that can be affected by political action. You can add words like protest, demonstration, congress, senate, bill, legistation, law, etc. You add words to an alert with an OR in upper case, and put all these words in parentheses. if you haven’t built a Google search like this, get the details from my tutorial. This is an example:
“climate change” (demonstration OR protest OR congress OR senate OR bill OR legislation OR regulation OR law)
3. All politics is local, so you should add a location to the alert to deliver news with more impact for local citizens. You can add the location: operator with the name of a city, state, or country to your alert for more focused news:
“climate change” (demonstration OR protest OR congress OR senate OR bill OR legislation OR regulation OR law) location:india
4. Now you can spread the word. Imagine what Paul Revere could have done with Twitter. You can blog the news, tweet it, post it on Delicious, email it to a list, create a daily report of news stories as a PDF and distibrute it as a printable flyer. Come to think of it, Thomas Paine would have had a lot of fun with Twitter too. I don’t even want to think about the mischief Sam Adams would have caused.
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