Launched in December, the White House used Twitter to let ordinary people sound off about the value of $40, which is the amount that would have been cut from the average American's weekly paycheck under a Republican tax proposal. The campaign was an instant success, as it transcended partisan lines and put complex tax policy into simple language.

While Republicans claimed the campaign oversimplified the debate, it didn't stop them from trying a less-successful version of the Twitter hash tag campaign leading into President Obama's State of the Union address.

Obama announced the renewed #40dollars campaign in a 40-second YouTube video that will be released later today. In it, he asks supporters to use the #40dollars hash tag or make comments on the White House Website.

"Your voices changed the debate and reminded Washington what was at stake. Well, once again I need you," Obama said in the video. "We all need you to speak out. Because if Congress fails to act soon, then taxes on the middle class will go up."

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

Unless, of course, you're a presidential candidate and his campaign staff. We asked expert Web designers to evaluate the major presidential candidates' campaign Web sites. The candidates got okay, but not great, marks. And in a year when social media and mobile technology could play a role in the election, okay may not be good enough.

What follows is a look at how each candidate's Web site did on overall site design, content and presentation, and mobile functionality.

Overall Site Quality

Barack Obama

The incumbent's site uses some modern Web design technology, including HTML5, proper CDN asset storage, microformats and semantically named elements. The site is "very well put together" with "lots of newfangled tricks like Modernizer and Jquery," according Udell.

"Obama's polished, mobile friendly site is no surprise," Udell said. "He's had the 
longest to prepare. He also was a big proponent of opensource software in
his last campaign."

Mitt Romney

Romney's site is heavy on video content and makes links to social media engagement prominent. The site uses some antiquated techniques to track location, but overall it works well.

"Romney's social media badging is pervasive and obvious. No mistaking 
it for anything else here," Udell said. It would be nice to see the share icons use a 
light window rather than a full browser redirect, but it's acceptable and
 easy enough to use."

Newt Gingrich

The former House Speaker's site doesn't use HTML5 and has fewer calls to action and chances for visitors to share social content as Romeny's site. Gingrich, like every other GOP candidate, has a site that is not optimized for mobile. The site is accessible on a smartphone, but requires lots of scrolling and zooming to navigate.

While Udell said the lack of social media icons made it cleaner than some of the other sites, overall the site's "aesthetic is the least
 contemporary."

Rick Santorum

Tuesday's big caucus winner uses generic Facebook and Twitter widgets on his site, which draw away from a visually well-designed site. The site has an "interesting, mature color theme. It's red, white and bue, but very 
deep and not typical," Udell said.

But the pros stop there. In addition to not having a site enhanced for mobile viewers, Santorum uses some rather primitive Web design techniques.

"Using tables for layouts?" Udell said. "Really? It's 2012!"

Ron Paul

Paul is the only candidate to not use Drupal, instead opting for WordPress in his site design. And unlike the other candidates, Paul's site is text heavy, opting to stay on message with lots of text as opposed to video and photo content.

Content and Presentation

Barack Obama: Obama's campaign staff makes use of a lot of inforgraphics to make key policy arguments - a wise move, according to Nathan Hunt, founder of Dressler, a digital strategy and design firm in
 New York City.

The site "also uses infographic-like design to maintain a consistent 
design theme throughout," Hunt said. "This is the design equivalent of being disciplined 
and staying 'on-message'."

Mitt Romney: Hunt gives points to Romney's design team for having a clear sense of how to effectively use the Web. Romeny is photogenic, and the site puts that quality to good use. Hunt was most impressed with the "Caucus For Mitt Tool" which gives supporters specific and immediate directions on how they can help the candidate.

Newt Gingrich: The content presentation is confusing. The type is too big (perhaps it was chosen with elderly visitors in mind, Hunt said), and a righthand navigation bar draws the eye away from the content.

"Rather than establish a clear hierarchy of
 communication, this site attempts to yell everything at once," Hunt said.

Rick Santorum: Hunt's analysis of the site was pointed.

"This looks like something that someone's nephew designed," he said. "In truth, it is
 probably a template website that someone downloaded and adapted for the 
campaign."

Ron Paul: Paul's site has lots of text, but it also could have used a good editor and a style guide. All CAPS and italics are used with no rhyme or reason, and there are awkward combinations of serif and sans serif fonts.

"A lot of decisions
 seem to have been made just to 'look cool'," Hunt said. "While it does look cool, digital
 is about functionality, not just appearance."

Mobile

Barack Obama: The President's Web designers did a good job of making a site that works well on iPhones, but Aaron Maxwell, founder of Mobile Web Up, found some errors when he tried to access the site on Blackberry Torch, Android and Windows Phone 7.

"The Obama designers chose to use a responsive web design to create a single
 set of pages adaptable to different screen widths," Maxwell said. "It looks like 
they focused on really polishing the mobile view for iOS, but allowed
errors to slip in on other mobile platforms."

Mitt Romney: The former Massachusetts governor is the only Republican candidate who has a Web site optimized for viewing on mobile devices. But Maxwell found problems similar to those he found when viewing Romney's site outside of iOS. Like Obama's site, Romney's had certificate errors when viewed in Blackberry Torch and was unviewable in Windows Phone 7. "This 
is a flaw in their device detection - though a minor one, given how small
 WP7's market share is at the moment," Maxwell said.

Gingrich, Santorum and Paul do not have sites optimized for viewing on mobile devices.

Even more telling is where on the Internet that information comes from: 6% of poll respondents said they are regularly learning about the campaign from Facebook, followed by YouTube videos (3%) and Twitter (2%), according to Pew.

One reason social media hasn't grown by the leaps and bounds predicted is less engagement by young people. In 2008, there were two contested primaries, including a Democratic primary which has traditional drawn younger and arguably more tech-savvy voters. This year, only one in five people under 30 say they have been following the campaigns "very closely," down from 31% in 2008.

Politico reports that both the Romney and Obama campaigns have started using Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's "magical" dongle, Square. Of course, you can't pay by saying your name as you now can at select merchants, but Square still makes campaign donations much faster and easier. Staff, field organizers and campaign volunteers hook up Square to their mobile phones and accept campaign donations on the spot.

Barack Obama has been leading the way on social media, giving the most interactive State of the Union address ever on Jan 24. It featured a Twitter hashtag and the entire speech was streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/SOTU. The White House also hosted a Google+ Hangout on Jan 30, which our own Jon Mitchell attended and blogged about. Sure, it might have been fun to hangout with the Prez, but unless you were one of the five Americans who actually hung out with him live, Mitchell reports, the experience felt just like television. Obama first launched as a Google+ brand, not a profile, late last year. Not long ago, the president joined Instagram.

Yes, it's pretty awesome that the Obama campaign is using Square, the oh-so-popular mobile photo app Instagram and the Google+ hangout feature. But we are at a point now where social media tools and mobile payments are hardly a novelty. Instead, they are accepted and necessary modes of communication. Will Square help raise more funds for Obama and Romney? Or is it just another payment option for the few?

Which begs the question: How long before all of us can vote from the comfort of our laptop or smartphone?

Darin Gibby, a patent attorney and partner at Kilpatrick, Townsend and Stockton and author of Why Has America Stopped Inventing?, said the technology used in online voting is similar to that used to process credit card transactions. Voters may receive a temporary password or be asked by a web portal for information that only they would know.

If the password "was stolen by a fraudster during voting, it wouldn't matter as the password would expire the moment it is used," Gibby said. "For those who want additional security, biometrics could be used - meaning that a fingerprint ID mechanism could be hooked into a USB port for further identification. Although this may seem costly, many scanners like this already come standard on some laptop models."

In other words, online elections have the potential to decrease voter fraud. But changing the status quo, particularly in government, is always an uphill battle.

"Implementing a secure, cost-effective voting system is easily within the grasp of any state, even those with ailing budgets. Cost simply isn't an issue, and neither is security," Gibby said. "It all comes does to the simple fact that we have nobody in government positions who is willing to step forward and make the change."

The move was so popular, Republicans are trying it for their election-year digital strategy. Ahead of last night's State of the Union address, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney and other Republicans started tweeting using the hashtag #1000days to accent the amount of time since Senate Democrats passed a federal budget.

"#40dollars means my grocery budget for the week" just does a much better job of tugging at the heart strings than "Lewis and Clark traveled to the West Coast in 862 days. The U.S. Senate hasn't passed a budget in #1000Days."

"We kind of proved it in a very clear and public way that this money was significant to a lot of people," Kori Schulman, White House deputy director for digital strategy,said at the What's Next? D.C. conference on Monday. "This was sort of a make or break moment for us, and we kept reinforcing that this was important and kept at it."

At this writing, Topsy is saying #1000days has generated close to 2,500 tweets in the past day. By comparison, when @WhiteHouse first used the #40dollars hash tag at 4:15 pm on Dec. 19, it was trending worldwide by 5 p.m. and generating about 6,000 tweets per hour.

It's clear that the digitial media campaigns had different goals, and #1000days was primarily aimed at emphasizing a point that was notably absent in President Obama's State of the Union address last night. But if social media as it pertains to politics is truly about connecting with voters and constituents, score one for the Democrats.

Traditional polls still did a better job of predicting the outcome of Saturday's South Carolina primary, but a backwards look at Twitter may show why and how Newt Gingrich scored such a decisive, 12-point victory over national front runner Mitt Romney. And in some regards, social media was able to tell a story in South Carolina that polls could not.

Public Policy Polling did a much better job than social media analytics by GlobalPoint in predicting the actual results of Saturday's results, in large part because Ron Paul's votes have yet to catch up with his social media mentions. To its credit, though, Global point saw Gingrich with 31 percent of the vote to Romney's 19 percent, while the traditional poll was prediciting a much tighter, six-point race.

What social media did do better than traditional polls, however, is show how Gingrich's support surged followed Thursday night's debate. That night could have been a toss-up for Gingrich: while pundits said Gingrich held his own and Romney may have lost ground, Gingrich had the added potential pitfall of an ABC News interview with his ex-wife that night.

Twitter almost instantly showed that the ABC interview was not going to be a factor, and any mentions of the interview - positive or negative - may have actually helped Gingrich by pushing negative, social media comments about his debate performance to the background.

Meanwhile, OhMyGov is reporting that Gingrich saw a surge in Facebook fans and Twitter followers in the hours that followed the debate. That followed a surge of social media activity (and a corresponding bump in the polls) for Gingrich following the first of two debates in South Carolina on Jan. 16.

The lesson thus far in the 2012 election that social media, like traditional polling, can't accurately predict races (particularly races involving Ron Paul, it would seem). But as researchers spend more time analyzing the data, social media is showing itself as an effective tool in better understanding a presidential campaign, which amounts to a daily war of attrition for public sentiment.

"The truth of the matter is the law as written is far too intrusive, far too expansive," Romney said. "It would have a depressing impact on one of the fastest growing industries... I'm standing for freedom."

Opposition by the Republican presidential candidates comes as overall GOP support for the measure deteriorates, which has started to push the measure towards partisan lines and has increasingly forced Democrats to take the defensive in moving the legislation forward. That's a change from earlier this month, when none of the Republican presidential candidates had taken a firm position on SOPA.

In addition to Romney's denouncement of the bill, the other three candidates also made anti-SOPA comments in Thursday's debate:

• Newt Gingrich said the bill, as written, censors the Internet. "The idea that we're going to preemptively have the government start censoring the Internet on behalf of giant corporations' economic interests strikes me as exactly the wrong thing to do," he said.
• Ron Paul said SOPA and PIPA threaten freedom. ""This bill is not going to pass but watch out for next one, and I am pleased that the attitude is sort of mellowed up here, because the Republicans unfortunately have been on the wrong side of this issue," he said.
• Rick Santorum may have been the least commital. While Santorum took the populist stance of opposing SOPA and PIPA, he was quick to add the Internet is not somewhere "where anyone can do anything they want."

The Obama administration, meanwhile, has said it has reservations about the way the law is currently written. But in a statement Saturday, the White House said it remains committed to giving law enforcement new tools to fight online piracy.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore

Wikimedia Foundation says the blackout reached 162 million people. Of those, 8 million used Wikipedia's tool to look up their congressional representatives. The blackout generated three trending Twitter topics when it started at midnight Eastern Time on Wednesday. Twitter also revealed frustration and lack of understanding of the blackout. But this was all by design. Censorship is frustrating. Wikipedians wanted a campaign that was both symbolic and effective, and that's what its staff delivered.

Wikimedia Foundation has been tracking SOPA/PIPA as a threat since the hearings in November. After the first official markup of SOPA in December, Wikimedia published its first public stance against the bill, saying it would "hurt the free web and Wikipedia." At that point, the staff and the worldwide community of volunteers began to discuss some kind of concerted response.

The effort got its own dedicated Wikipedia page where the community hashed out the details. At the end of the process, volunteers examined the results. They presented a request to the Wikimedia Foundation proposing the community's vision of the blackout: Shut down English Wikipedia, leaving the mobile version accessible, but blocking access to all pages on the desktop except those for SOPA (the House version) and PIPA (the Senate version).

"It was challenging" for the organization to follow the will of a huge community, says Jay Walsh, Wikimedia's head of communications, "but they also helped us to keep it simple." The staff continued working with the community right up to the blackout figuring out how to word the messages. The final message was three sentences long and not specific. "Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet," it said. There was a link to learn more, but this basic explanation was all the landing page displayed.

This Is The World We Might Find Ourselves Living In

"We were presenting information, but we were also presenting a reality," Walsh says. "The community knew that a protest like this would establish that reality: This is the world we might find ourselves living in." For the millions of people who use Wikipedia every day, that was bound to be frustrating, but that was exactly the point.

Two days before the blackout, Wikimedia's executive director, Sue Gardner, posted the announcement of the blackout on the Wikimedia blog to prepare the community. It explains how Wikipedians arrived at the decision to protest and anticipated some criticism. "In making this decision, Wikipedians will be criticized for seeming to abandon neutrality to take a political position," Gardner wrote. "But although Wikipedia's articles are neutral, its existence is not."

That post received over 12,000 comments. "I'm used to seeing so much dreck [in online comments]," Walsh says, "and yeah, a lot of people were angry and thought this wasn't going to work." Many of the criticisms were thoughtful, arguing that a blackout wouldn't work. Others expressed dismay that Wikipedia would be offline, even for a day (and despite the fact that using the mobile version or turning off Javascript would bring it right back). The most salient message Walsh got from the comments was "I hate that this has to happen, but I get it."

A Protest & A Demonstration

Not everyone got it. Once the blackout went up, a brilliant Twitter curator named @herpderpedia tracked confused and outraged tweets about it all day. "I think there's a lot of ignorance," Walsh says, "a lot of misunderstanding." People use Wikipedia as a utility, and the blackout was an effort to show users that it's not that simple. "And we're not saying, 'Don't take Wikipedia for granted,'" Walsh says. "We're saying there's more to it. You can continue to take Wikipedia for granted, but it has to exist in a legislative environment where it can work."

"This effort was about getting people to fight this bill," Walsh says, "but it also has resulted in people taking a little bit more interest in what SOPA/PIPA might do to the Internet as a whole."

Congress pissed off wikipedia and google. wtf?

— Juliet Adams (@xjulietadamsx) January 18, 2012

Wikipedia's blackout didn't have to drive every single user to study the bills and understand them. It only had to engage a few and cause the rest to make a lot of noise. By demonstrating the frustration of an Internet blackout, the issue attracted more attention than a more straightforward campaign would have gotten.

5% of the people who hit Wikipedia's blackout page looked up their representatives' contact information. That's 8 million people. Surely not all of them called, faxed or emailed. But ProPublica tracked members of Congress on their positions on SOPA/PIPA between yesterday and today, and look at the difference. The tactics employed yesterday by Wikipedia and other sites moved the needle.

The Washington Post, the Guardian and NPR are collaborating on an experiment to see if they can fill the knowledge void left by Wikipedia's blackout. Using the Twitter hashtag #altwiki, these news outlets want to answer factual questions for Web users who can't get to Wikipedia. The Washington Post calls it "a single-day Band-Aid" for the missing encyclopedia.

If Wikipedia disappears for forever there's no way I'm getting through college..

The blackout campaign is having no trouble attracting attention, but as the Twitter account @herperpedia has been valiantly demonstrating since midnight last night, many users aren't getting past the "WTF WIKIPEDIA" stage of grief. A convenient, trusted source of knowledge is missing, and some users don't know what to do.

why oh why have they shut down wikipedia?:(

— Beth Lamb (@_bethanne_) January 18, 2012

Yesterday, the Washington Post proposed to step in and help those Wikipedia users in distress. "Ask a question on Twitter with the hashtag #altwiki," the Post's David Beard wrote, "and we'll ask our readers to help provide an answer. We'll answer a few ourselves - and likely blog about that tomorrow."

The Post is documenting the process today, highlighting a few choice answers on its blog. It offers a few important disclaimers: "#AltWiki, of course, doesn't seek to replace Wikipedia, or indicate that The Post is taking a stand against the House's Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) or the Senate's Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). It does, however, tell us quite a bit about how much 477 million people a month rely on Wikipedia."

The Washington Post has taken to Twitter to promote the idea, but there's a lot of trolling going on in the hashtag without many answers.

#altwiki why do i have a defective brain

— ETPC1 (@ETPC1) January 18, 2012

Offering to field the world's Wikipedia questions on Twitter is pretty ambitious. The Post and NPR say it's all in "fun." The #altwiki experiment is not a stand for or against SOPA/PIPA, but the Washington Post is taking the opportunity to present the facts about these bills. The decision by mainstream sites to go dark today has brought the issue to the fore, and maybe even the slightest glimmer of awareness is worth one weird day on the Internet.

Congress pissed off wikipedia and google. wtf?

— Juliet Adams (@xjulietadamsx) January 18, 2012

A few days ago, I wrote about Wikipedia's plans to black itself out in protest of SOPA. I don't often flood my Facebook Timeline with my own tech writing, but I decided to share that story, given the broad impact the story was likely to have beyond the technology community. It got a few "likes" and from one generally well-informed, but non-techie friend, a confession: "I had to Wikipedia SOPA."

From Reddit to the New York Times: SOPA Goes Mainstream

If today's protests were designed to heighten public awareness of the tech industry's opposition to SOPA and related anti-piracy bills, the tactic appears to be working quite well.

Successful or Not, It's a New Breed of Digital Activitism

There will undoubtedly be debates about whether or not today's demonstrations had an impact on the survival of the anti-piracy bills being considered by Congress. This is especially true considering that the fate of SOPA was unclear even before Jimmy Wales announced that Wikipedia would be going dark.

What is undeniable, though, is that what's happening on the Internet today represents the pinnacle of a new breed of digital activism. Not only can Web-based communities succeed in forcing large corporations to reconsider controversial policies, but a concerted and widespread enough effort to voice meaningful dissent on the Internet can, at the very least, generate serious awareness about an issue.

Today's acts of symbolic self-censorship and advocacy go beyond their PR effect. Rather than just going dark, many sites are actively encouraging users to contact their representatives in Congress. Wikipedia has made looking up your representatives' contact information one of the few things you can do on their English-language site today.

Perhaps this issue is somewhat unique in that it is perceived to strike at the heart of the Internet and, in turn, the Internet is striking back. Many have wondered if other issues could ever see the kind of outcry that SOPA has generated. It's true that sites like Wikipedia and Google are unlikely to throw their weight behind an issue that doesn't deal so directly with the inner workings of the Web itself.

Yet even before the big players officially got involved, a grassroots movement was already well underway, fueled by communities like Reddit and technology-focused blogs. That movement had already successfully challenged a few companies and generated online petitions about SOPA, one of which caught the White House's attention.

The Web may not be reinventing democracy as we know it, but as examples like this proliferate, it's hard to not take its potential longterm impact seriously.

For her part, Obama followed five accounts, including her husband's, three official White House Twitter accounts and the account of Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina. The account is being maintained by Obama's reelection campaign, with tweets posted by the First Lady signed "-mo."

If this is a weapon, the Democrats may be in trouble. While it certainly can't hurt, tweets about the MLK Day of Service and health care initatives backed by the First Lady certainly don't seem like a death blow to the GOP. Most of the activity on the account's first day was from well-wishers welcoming her to Twitter, including a message from President Obama.

"It's not every day we get to welcome the First Lady of the United States to Twitter -- happy to have you," the first tweet from President Obama's account said this morning.

The President's account is also managed by his campaign staff, and his wife has some catching up to do: @BarackObama has 11.9 million followers.

Think carefully: all six have come out in opposition to the bill, which would put tight restrictions on Internet firms in an effort to enforce U.S. copyright laws (although some firms took more convincing stands than others). At least two of the companies, Google and Amazon, have said they may go dark to protest the bill.

If you guessed GoDaddy, which had a public dust up after initially supporting SOPA, you're right. Sort of. GoDaddy's PAC leads in percentage, giving 52.9% of the $38,750 it has given during this election cycle to Representatives that have signed on to co-sponsor SOPA and Senators who are co-sponsoring PIPA.

• Microsoft $88,500 (20.9%)
• eBay $32,750 (35.5%)
• Google $29,000 (47.5%)
• GoDaddy $20,500 (52.9%)
• Yahoo! $11,000 (35.5%)
• Amazon $4,000 (42.1%)

We contacted all six companies asking for comment and requested they get back to us by 3 pm ET/noon PT on Thursday. All of the companies missed that deadline, but we'll update if any of them get back to us.

ReadWriteWeb analyzed Federal Election Commission data maintained by OpenSecret.org. While the reports are for the current election cycle, they do not list the dates of individual donations, making it hard to determine if the donations were made before or after a lawmaker signed on to co-sponsor the bills.

SOPA, and its Senate counerpart, PIPA, would force search engines and websites to block links to sites that are listed as being "dedicated" to copyright infringement. SOPA has been widely endorsed by traditional media companies, but Web firms and free speech advocates have likened it to government-enforced censorship.

Outspoken Supporters Received PAC Money

All of the donations were made in the 2012 election cycle, and individual donations ranged from $1,000 to a high of $10,000 given to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. by Microsoft. Only two SOPA/PIPA sponsoring lawmakers received donations from all six company PACs: Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va.

Hatch, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee that unanimously approved PIPA in May, has been a long-time backer of the bill and its earlier versions.

"Fake pharmaceuticals threaten people's lives. Stolen movies, music and other products put many out of work," Hatch said in a statement posted on his Web site in May. "This is why protecting property rights is a critical imperative and is why we've come together in introducing this common-sense bill."

Goodlatte, meanwhile, made comments supporting SOPA as early as April, but didn't sign on as a co-sponsor until October.

"It is tempting to think of crimes involving counterfeiting and piracy, or intellectual property (IP) theft, as victimless, but this is simply untrue," he said a day after signing on as co-sponsor. "Piracy denies individuals who have invested in the creation and production of these goods a return on their investment thus reducing the incentive to invest in innovative products and new creative works. The end result is the loss of American jobs."

Among the SOPA/PIPA supporting lawmakers who were the biggest beneficiaries of donations from the PACs of six companies analyzed:

• Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah $15,500
• Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va. $14,000
• Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla. $12,000
• Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas $11,000
• Rep. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif. $10,000
• Rep. Mary Bono Mack, R-Calif. $7,000
• Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. $7,000
• Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. $7,000
• Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla. $7,000
• Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. $6,500

A complete breakdown of donations by each company's PAC to lawmakers is available.

In Iowa, Fox News unveiled an exclusive partnership with Google. NBC News and Facebook have expanded a partnership to cover political polling. The Daily Beast is also working in cahoots with NBC.

Partnerships between media companies are nothing new: print publications have a long history of partnering with broadcast outlets on political polls and other news coverage. The question for these new media partnerships is who benefits? Viewers and readers, to an an extent, will always benefit from broader coverage, but in this case it may be the Web companies that are getting a bigger boost.

Facebook's deal with NBC probably doesn't add a lot of depth of coverage, but it does increase viewer interaction. The co-sponsorship of last Sunday's Republican candidates debate helped stodgy, old NBC News connect with younger viewers, while Facebook gets more exposure with a national television audience.

The Google-Fox News alliance is more about news gathering: in both Iowa and New Hampshire, Google fed search data and YouTube video from candidates' appearances to Fox News, and the network's reporters gained exclusive access to broadcast from Google's data center during the Iowa caucus.

But there is also a touch of cross-promotion similar to the Facebook-NBC deal (or older, more established partnerships like CBS-New York Times and ABC-Washington Post). In a September debate co-sponsored by Fox and Google, Google helped field more than 18,000 questions for candidates.

In one sense, initiatives like that are cool: they help restore a feeling of connectivity between voters and candidates in an age of slick, national campaigns, and take some of the power away from professional pundits who, frankly, often get too caught up in the horse-race nature of a presidential election.

But they should also make old-line media companies somewhat nervous: last year Facebook followed Google in setting up a political action committee, and both companies have taken strong stances on things like the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP Acts (Facebook's PAC is so new that it has yet to report to the Federal Election Commission, but OpenSecrets.org has data on how Google's PAC has been spending its money).

That makes it difficult to determine whether Google and Facebook are playing the role of objective, news-gathering operation or politically-influential Web players flexing their clout. In that instance, the losers may very well be viewers, readers and, most importantly, voters.

Meanwhile, President Barack Obama's reelection campaign has already spent $5.8 million on Internet advertising - more than the campaign has spent on media consultants, broadcast, print and miscellaneous media combined, according to Federal Election Commission data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

• Newt Gingrich (R) $64,9110
• Mitt Romney (R) $428,057
• Ron Paul (R) $288,331
• Rick Santorum (R) $59,518
• Jon Huntsman (R) $16,525
• Fred Karger (R) $100
• Total $1,441,641

Court rulings in 2009 and 2010 loosened rules on how so-called Super Political Action Committees spend advertising money, and a lot of that money is expected to head online. That could dramatically change the landscape of the 2012 presidential election and open new revenue streams for online companies that host ads.

PACs Could Spend Heavily On Internet Advertising

Most of the 269 groups that have registered as super PACs with the Federal Election Commission hire advertising agencies to make media buys, making it almost impossible to determine which specific companies got money when looking at expenditure reports. But one PAC, the Ron Paul-supporting group known as Endorse Liberty, has been making direct media buys, offering hints about which companies are poised to get a boost in the current election cycle.

Endorse Liberty spent $740,964 on online advertising in the two weeks ended Monday. Of that, $462,350, or 62.4%, went to Google for AdWords buys, according to OpenSecrets.org, a Web site operated by the Center For Responsive Politics.

During the same time, Endorse Liberty spent $195,629 (26.4%) on Facebook advertising, $32,804 (4.4%) on paid Stumbles and $50,000 (6.8%) with online advertising agency CampaignGrid LLC.

Google Prepared To Work With PACs

Of course those numbers reflect spending by one PAC in support of one candidate, and they do not paint an overall picture of who the big winners and losers will be in online advertising during this election season. But they do suggest Google could dominate, and that may stem from the company's active solicitation of advertising from PACs. Google will also likely benefit from ads placed on YouTube by both the PACs and the campaigns.

"In 2010, independent expenditure groups had a limited budget, but we're already seeing that 2012 is going to be big," Sean Harrison, head of advertising sales for independent expenditures at Google, told TechPresident.

The blog reports that Google is actively mobilizing to handle campaign ads, including putting up a firewall between PACs and candidate campaigns, which are barred from coordinating advertising efforts one another.

As for what the campaigns themselves are spending, that's harder to tell: OpenSecrets only has breakdowns of general expenditures for each candidate's campaign, and online advertising buys are lumped under "Media" for most of the candidates.

Photo credit Gage Skidmore.