I really like this app: it’s entirely about the differences between the candidates in their own words. I find it orders of magnitude more interesting than coverage of campaigning and verbal jousting and polling. I went in with two favorite candidates. In my results, they ranked second and last. I barely have researched my new top-ranked candidate, so I’m happy to have more reading to do and a new favorite.

If you do take this quiz, try both the Republican or Democrat edition, or at least read the answers in the other party’s. I was struck that every single candidate said that “securing the borders” was their top priority for immigration. Apparently the 49th parallel is so dangerous and that Canadians are such cause for concern that everything else in immigration is unimportant.

Derek scraped all the candidates’ FEC filings into a database and I put a search engine on the front of it. The candidate pages all have little targeted search engine forms — so on the Obama page (you did open it, right?) there’s a form to search all the contributions to him. More-focused pages like the Q3 filings and Obama’s Q3 filings pages do the more-focused searched you’d expect. (By the way: if you see some contribute $4,600, it’s because they gave the max to the candidate’s Primary Election PAC and General Election PAC; negative contributions are the PAC returning over-donations.)

The full search engine has every last field you can search by, just in case you’re curious about every self-employed therapist in the Chicago area who gave the legal max to Romney in August.

We have slightly more data than we’re sharing (like street address) and considered where we’d draw that line — it’s not interesting in and of itself that J. Random Citizen (in this case, Janet Duchossois) gave money to Romney, but wider views like how many max contributions he got in August are interesting. Part of what makes it worth including names, zips, and occupations is that we want to prompt searchers to think about contributions in all these different ways. Another of it is that sometimes you can find oddities that turn out to be newsworthy. The data is all public record, but making it easily searched, mined, and totaled challenges people’s unconscious expectation of anonymity in public crowds.

To catch the eye of folks who, shall we say, would not otherwise find it very interesting to poke through quarterly filings to the Federal Elections Commissions, the Politics team is going through the donations and flagging the donations of celebrities and other public figures. The Noteworthy Donors box under the search form picks three few people to highlight. It’s still incomplete, but it’s a fun feature and I’ve already seen donations I wouldn’t have thought to search on. (Eagle-eyed readers will note they can append &noteworthy=1 onto search URLs to filter, but we didn’t add UI for it.)

The Politics team has also been busy contacting state legislators and asking them who they Endorse for President. Right now they’re just tracking the ~950 legislators of the five battleground states, but there are plans to expand it that I’ll call out when we do so. This just went public a few hours ago and it wasn’t live for 30 minutes — we hadn’t even sent around an internal memo, let alone made a public announcement — before a campaign contacted us with a new endorsement for their candidate.

In non-political news, I helped launch the Local Blog Directory.

I wrote more about living in DC I’d look to get Push cx listed. (Note: Dan Berko did almost all of the dev work for this, I just made some tweaks before pushing it live.)

The article ran in the Sunday paper and we were hoping folks would take it in to work and argue with coworkers about what numbers to assign to which band and we’ve been happy with how much traffic we saw. And a few hours ago a Metafilter story went up about it, which is pretty dang cool.

Today the first project I built launched, the Politics Glossary. It’s a small site cataloging political jargon and all the writing is done by the Politics department. Actually, one of the best things about this job is getting to meet folks at all levels and departments in the Post.

I build and maintain website projects that support stories from the paper or play to the unique strengths of the web as a medium. As examples, Faces of the Fallen can be seen as an expansion of obituaries and the U.S. Congress Votes Database is a large database that wouldn’t work in print. There are several dozen of these projects. The two I just linked are the two largest and most-frequently updated, though most are small and not constantly updated after their initial launch. This team is experimenting a lot with what it means to do journalism on the web and I’m proud to be part of it.

Obligatory Official Disclaimer: “My comments are entirely personal and do not represent the views of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive or any other Washington Post Company affiliate.”