Politico TrackerWhile Politico Tracker Twitter Edition, which I just reviewed, is a great tool for the new junkie, consider the full-blown Politico Tracker app as the toolbox.  You are not limited to the PR kind of stuff that a politician may post on Twitter.  To say that this app is comprehensive is an understatement.  To do it justice, you would really have to delve into the documentation on the developer’s site.  I’ll try to sumarize it though.

While this app does require the internet to work, it does a lot more than just a web search on a politician.  Using the unique Llesiant technology, it accesses “over 25,000 publications from around the globe – including more than 11,000 State and Federal Government News Sources”.  This includes newspapers and such, but also press releases, industry journals, lobbiest groups (like AARP), and so forth.  These can be categorized by source, topic, and other means.  For example, if I am interested in the recent ruling where a federal judge in Florida ruled that Georgia couldn’t use water from a lake that resided there but must let the water flow out of Georgia and into Florida (nuts, I know!), I can choose to look at the stories related to my senior senator and the Army Corps of Engineers.  The app finds nine recent articles on that.  If your chosen politician is mentioned in an article, the headline shows up.  Clicking on the headline will bring up the excerpt of the article in which they are mentioned and highlight their name.  The source of the article is hyperlinked and will take you to the full article at the original location.

Both state and federal politicians are available in the database for your selection.  While the politician database is not categorized by state like the Twitter Edition is, that is coming in the next update along with an update to about 8,000 politicians in the database.   Other improvements will include the ability to email the articles that you find of interest.  You can currently save them on your system for reading later or open it in Safari and email it from there.

The new state categories for looking up your politician is going to be a huge improvement in this app.  I’ve suggested taking it a step further though and allow those that need to the ability to find out who their representatives are though in case they don’t know.  As I suggested in the Twitter app, I’d also love to see the ability to add candidates to the database and not have it limited to current politicians.  Right now, the starting point for a search is a specific politician.  Ultimately, I’d love to be able to search the news database using the existing categories or sources or industries as the starting point and review the headlines no matter what politician is mentioned.  As a $10 app, the amount of information available is incredible.  How to get to it though is still limited.  In my water wars example above, I’d love to see all the recent stories about the Corp of Engineers without having to go look up who the politicians from Florida and Alabama are that may have commented on it.  For that matter, being able to put in a custom search term, like “Lake Lanier”, would add incredible power to this already useful application.  It would make it more topic driven and politician driven.

UPDATE: The update for OS 3.0 has now been approved by Apple.  It includes 30% more politicians, sorting them by state or name, email of links to articles, and other improvements.