My 20% project got mentioned in the Wall Street Journal today. I haven’t seen the article in paper, but my project was mentioned at the end of a page 1 story. The online version is behind a paywall, so I won’t bother linking to it.

Anyway, here’s the relevant part… my project is at the very end:

Some other Google initiatives are less explicitly geared toward currying favor with policy makers and powerful constituents, but could help further those ends just as well. At the state level, Google executives met earlier this week with several secretaries of state at a conference as part of an exploratory effort to make voting information such as locations of polling sites more easily accessed online.

Katie Jacobs Stanton, the product manager for Google’s financial news and information service, says she was disappointed that the company didn’t provide more services to voters during the 2004 presidential election. Ms. Stanton, who spent a year working at the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in the 1990s, has helped pull together about 15 colleagues to work on services for next year’s election. The employees are using the 20% of their work time Google allows them to spend on individual projects.

One fruit of their efforts is a tool to be released in the near future that individuals will be able to use to annotate video of the presidential debates. Other people could then play back the video and see running commentary such as fact-checking analyses of the candidates’ statements.

I was kinda hoping to get my name in the article, since it is my project (just the part in the last paragraph- Katie is running the elections effort in general). Maybe I should have spiced things up with controversial quotes like “George Bush doesn’t care about software engineers” or something..

Golden Eagle Lager Beer (from India) has an aftertaste like an ashtray.