Using Evernote to follow the 2012 GOP Election

What is Evernote?

Evernote is a tool that can help you remember anything.  You can take a quick note on your Iphone/Android smartphone, collect web clippings with the web clipping tool, or upload documents into new notes and organize and collect them into separate folders...and all of this is just a sampling of what you can do with Evernote. 

2012 Republican nominee election process

Later this year, we will be flocking to the polls to determine if we would like to stay with our current president, Barack Obama, or elect one of the GOP (Grand Old Party) candidates to the office of the President of the United States of America.  However, that won't take place until November 6th, 2012.  

In the mean time, the Republican party is currently underway to determine who they will select to face Barack Obama (incumbent) for the U.S. Presidential election.  The process by which a candidate is chosen to be the Republican nominee can be a very long, and sometimes complicated, political battle.  It involves each state selecting delegates to a particular candidate of their choosing by voting in a primary or attending a caucus (more on the process in a upcoming blog post, but if you have questions in the meantime, check out this article).  

Of course, the amount of data and articles that are produced during this process is massive.  You have all the major news channels (Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, etc) covering the election process with their own websites and blogs and you have major newspaper companies (Wall St. Journal, USA Today, Forbes, etc) covering the election in their online articles and print articles...the statistics and data are endless.  

Using Evernote to follow the 2012 GOP election

So the question is, "How do you keep up with all these massive amounts of data?"  This is where Evernote becomes a tool that you wonder how you ever lived without it.  Ever been surfing the web and run across an article that you would love to share with your students or your colleagues?  With the Evernote web extension, all you have to do is click a button and save it to your Evernote account...which gives you the ability to access it on your smartphone, tablet, or computer.  I've used it to clip articles about the candidates,    results from each primary and caucus, and other highlights from debates (here's a example of a web clipping of the exit poll from the Georgia Primary). 

Evernote Clearly

Evernote also provides another tool to provide a less-clutter reading experience, Evernote Clearly.  Evernote Clearly gets rid of all the ads that can sometimes come along with articles, making it where you are just clipping the content from the article.  Here's a article I clipped using Evernote Clearly about Ron Paul.    

So why do I use Evernote?

The benefit of using Evernote to keep track of the election is that once you've saved the article into your account, it stays in your account until you delete it.  So no more worrying that the website you got the article from will delete the article or spending hours of time doing Google searches for a article that you think you remember the title of.  Once you've clipped it, you can organize it into a notebook of your choosing (I've created a notebook specifically for the 2012 election) and assign tags to it to where you have quick and easy access to it whenever you need it.  

If you don't have a Evernote account, sign-up for one today--it's free!