washingtonpost.com
Political Money, Tracked to Your Door
By Leslie Walker
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page F07
A new Web site makes it easy to see how much dough your neighbors are giving
to presidential candidates. FundRace 2004, launched 10 days ago at http://www.fundrace.org/, lets you enter any
street address and see what people at or near that location have contributed to
a presidential candidate, along with their addresses and occupations. The data
is based on reports that campaigns regularly file with the Federal Election
Commission (http://www.fec.gov/). You can also
look up a name and get the same information. Color-coded maps at the site show which regions lean Republican or Democratic
in their largess, and spotlight the five most generous addresses, by party, in
each city. In Washington, the top GOP address listed is 666 11th St. NW, an office
building whose occupants gave $10,000 to President Bush. Donors there included
parking magnate Leonard B. "Bud" Doggett. The top Democratic address is 2801 New Mexico Ave. NW, home to the Colonnade
condominiums, where 15 residents gave a total of $23,000. The most generous
donor there was Democratic consultant Michael Berman, who gave $2,000 each to
John Kerry, Dick Gephardt and Joe Lieberman, and $1,000 to Howard Dean. The creators of FundRace said they came up with the site as an experiment in
presenting public data in new ways. "We wanted to create something that would
connect ordinary people to the ways money influences politics," said Jonah
Peretti, research and development chief for Eyebeam, the Manhattan-based
nonprofit group that developed the site. While other sites offer contribution data -- the Center for Responsive
Politics' OpenSecrets.org (http://www.opensecrets.org/) lists
contributions for other races beyond the presidential contest -- FundRace's
distinction is the way it matches each address in the FEC filings with longitude
and latitude data. This lets you use the site to discover neighbors' names,
occupations and political leanings. Some folks don't like this ease of snooping, worrying that nosey employers or
stalkers could abuse FundRace. But Peretti and Michael Frumin, the lead developer, noted that all the
information is already publicly available (the FEC's site offers it, although
much less conveniently). "Anyone who is a crazy stalker, if they really wanted
to, could have found this information before," said Frumin. Web surfers got two new free software add-ons to help them manage online
research last week. Each works in Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser for
Windows and provides a shortcut to a search site. Lycos Inc.'s HotBot Desktop adds a toolbar to the top of the Internet
Explorer window that lets you search the Web as well as files on your own
computer. It also blocks pop-up ads. Finally, HotBot Desktop includes a
newsreader application that lets users subscribe to news headlines from the
thousands of Web sites that publish their content using a standard called "RSS"
(Really Simple Syndication). InfoSpace Inc., meanwhile, released its own free toolbar. It, too, comes with
a search shortcut (for InfoSpace's DogPile search engine) and an RSS newsreader.
DogPile's toolbar also includes a news ticker that scrolls a customized set of
headlines; mercifully, the ticker can be turned off. www.hotbot.com/tools/desktop E-mail Leslie Walker at walkerl@washpost.com.
