With the government shutdown, I’ve been seeing a lot of different members of Congress on TV. Some of them I’d never seen before. It made me uncomfortable to listen to their statements and not have any context of who they were and their past political activities. So I made a tool called Congress Corral ( https://congresscorral.com/ ). Congress Corral is free to use and has no ads.

Congress Corral lets you browse members of Congress via a number of filters and provides a page of details of useful links for each one, but lots of political directories do that. The magic happens with the four other tabs on the detail page.

YouTube: Most (not all) members of Congress have YouTube channels. This tab embeds the member’s YouTube RSS feeds, making them playable in the browser unless the channel specifically prohibits it. (Haven’t run across this yet.)

News Radar: Automatically checks the member’s Wikipedia page views since January 1, 2017, identifying spikes in public attention month by month and presenting you with a list of dates where the member might be in the news.

Each listing also includes a link to a date-bounded Google search. Fast way to catch up on a Congress member you’ve never heard of.

Search Local News: Identify TV stations serving a metro area and bundle their web sites into a Google search.

Easily compare news coverage across different markets.

Search Local Colleges: Identifies institutions of higher learning in a metro area and lets you bundle their web sites into a Google search. It can be very interesting to see how the members interact with local institutions.

I think activists, oppo researchers, journalists, engaged citizens, and nosy people will find this interesting/useful. Or, like me, you might just be wondering who’s that doing the three minute segment on CNN.

I’m thinking about adding more to this, like the related topics tool you’ll find on MiniGladys. I don’t know. I’m still pondering.