Starbucks, Chikfila and Ben and Jerry's are all doing election-day giveaways and apparently those are among Americans' top priorities. Let's keep that in mind when the press reports on record turnout!

Last month during the Presidential debates we wrote about the way that Google is changing political elections unlike anything else ever has. The ability to fact check, research in depth and learn more quickly about topics on the fly, during Presidential debates, is really world-changing.

Sometimes it's good to zoom out a bit, though, and remind ourselves on this huge day in history: what the people want is chicken, ice cream and coffee. You can see the full list of today's fastest rising search queries here.

According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, this is also what Obama's supporters expect from their candidate. 46% of Obama voters expect the newly elected President to reach out to them directly through email, social networks, and text messages.

Looking back at the election campaign, the Pew survey also found that 59% voters flocked to the net for campaign activities before the general election.

Can the Administration Sustain this Enthusiasm?

Sustaining this enthusiasm among voters will be a challenge for the new administration, however. The Pew study rightly asks if these voters will remain politically engaged once the excitement of the election has worn off. At the same time, the administration itself will have to work hard to fulfill these expectations and to sustain its own enthusiasm for these new technologies. After all, it has now been almost 56 days since Obama last used Twitter.

It will also be interesting to see if the Republican party will now turn to the net to mobilize its supporters in preparation for the next election cycle.

The internet has not only impacted this last election, it has forever changed politics in America.

Please enjoy this flickr slideshow of what we saw last night - the election, as seen on the web:

Politweets, of course, has been providing a similar service for quite a while already, but its scope is limited to just filtering out tweets with the candidates' names in it. Twitter, on the other hand, uses a constantly changing set of keywords, which makes it far more dynamic.

The most compelling feature of Twitter's election site is actually quite simple: the automatically updating stream. That's one feature we have always missed on our regular Twitter homepages and also one of the most compelling reason to use a desktop client instead of Twitter's site.

The value of a service like this is often not so much in the content of a single tweet, but in the aggregation and real-time view of the discussion. Even Twitter's Summize-based search does not update automatically. We have started to use Monitter to track Twitter conversations when there is a breaking news story because it updates automatically.

In addition, as Josh Catone points out, Twitter sits on a goldmine of similar information that it is not putting to good use yet. Now that they have this infrastructure in place, Twitter could easily create similar sites for other events, or even allow its users to create their own Twitter-based memetrackers in the future.

Intrade has contracts open for the electoral vote in each member of electoral college in the US. Based on that data, ElectoralMap.net has come up with a predicted map that's updated every couple of days. With 270 electoral votes needed to claim the presidency, the Intrade prediction market currently has Obama winning 289 to 227, with 18 votes up for grabs.

The map at Electoral-Vote.com, which relies on the latest phone survey data, has Obama winning 287 to 227 with 24 votes in a dead heat. Both maps show similar states in play, though the phone surveys tend to show a more nuanced picture of how the country may be planning to vote (note: that could be due to how each site's author is reading the respective data sets).

That said, it is still very early in election season, so you can expect both maps to change between now and November 4th. It will be interesting to see which of these methods is more accurate at ultimately predicting the outcome of the election, though it seems likely that the prediction markets will mirror the phone surveys because that's one of the major sources of information about how each state may vote for the investors.

That said, however, Obama has dominated the online discussion since day one. It would appear that when it comes to spreading his campaign message via widgets, there's no exception to the rule -- Obama widgets are far and away the most popular. (Though, note that the data on this graph is based on the candidate's most popular widget in the Widgetbox system, and not averaged across multiple widgets -- so it's really only good for looking at a general trend.)

We tried to match peaks and valleys in widget installs to news events to see if there was any correlation, which is really difficult with this data. It looks like Obama saw a growing number of installs in the run up to the Ohio and Texas primaries (entering which he'd won something like 11 or 12 contests in a row) -- then flat-lined for a month after he lost them. Clinton saw a modest bump after Super Tuesday in February where she scored huge wins in New York and California. Sen. John McCain saw a big dip the first week in March, which coincided with his becoming the presumptive nominee and President Bush's endorsement (we'll let you guess which might have turned people off his widget...).

But what's important about this data, is the trends. Starting with the Iowa caucuses just after New Year's, Barack Obama has seen his widgets spread steadily across the web. And even though his campaign does push the widgets on his site, 80-90% of new installs are coming via widgets embedded on non-official blogs -- they're coming from the grassroots rather than via the campaign itself. Clinton and McCain widgets are also being spread virally by supporters, though clearly not as fast. It does look like McCain supporters are doing a better job of embracing new web technologies than they were earlier in the election cycle, though -- the first McCain widgets appeared on Widgetbox in mid-February and have enjoyed mostly steady upward growth since.

This is really just another data point to watch to gauge which candidate has momentum. It's really quite amazing to look a things like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and widgets to measure a US presidential election -- the last time around most of these tools didn't exist (or at least weren't nearly as important).

The votes have been tallied and the results are in. OpenSocial Foundation members have selected Jay Parikh of Ning and Joseph Smarr of Plaxo as their community representatives.

Sixty-eight percent of the OpenSocial Foundation membership voted in the election. Parikh and Smarr were selected by members from 13 nominees. Each will serve a one-year term on the OpenSocial Foundation Board.

You've seen this done with church signs and parking tickets, but check out this particular manifestation of the personalization meme. I'm guessing that many of you will want to send it to friends and family. Hopefully at least 51% of you.

Feel the self-blame (and get some good laughs) via the MoveOn.org home page. Thanks to RWW team member Dionne Fox for finding this. I can only imagine what the Republican equivalent would look like.

I'm thinking Nintendo. Wii-lections, anyone?

More Noise to Signal

Arguing that the US has huge influence in Mexican elections and that Mexican immigrants, both legal and illegal (undocumented), are fundamental to maintaining the US economy - ¡México Decide! concludes that all immigrants, legal and illegal, ought to have some say in the US Presidential election.

¡México Decide! is the creation of artist Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga, whose previous work includes the video game Vagamundo: A Migrant's Tale.

This project was profiled today on the excellent blog We Make Money Not Art, where you'll find several links to related resources, information and perspectives that could help keep you from making a fool of yourself saying something stupid in comments.

Immigration is one of the key issues in US politics today, both on a policy level and as a metaphor for our larger relationship with history and the world we live in. I'd love to see more read/write type web projects engaging with these issues.

The U.S. Voter Info site was developed in partnership with with several state and local election officials, the League of Women Voters, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and others involved in the Voting Information Project. In true Google form, the site appears to as just a simple interface that hides the complicated data processing going on in the back-end. All you have to do to use the new site is enter in your home address in the box provided and click "Search."

Google then returns a host of personal voter information about your location including the number of days left for absentee ballot requests, a link to your local government's page where you can request an absentee ballot form, as well as other links to local government sites providing registration forms and other relevant election info. (The types of links will vary some from state to state). There's even a phone number to your state's voter hotline provided.

On the right side of the screen, a Google map displays. There is a green pin in your neighborhood and a red pin where your voting location is found. Then, with one click, you can get directions from your house to the polling site. This is very convenient, but unfortunately, when plugging in my own address, Google was not able to locate my voting location. Hopefully, others will have better success. (Let us know!)

In addition to the web site itself, Google is offering a "where to vote" gadget that can be customized and added to any web site. More importantly, there's an API available which allows third-party developers access to this data.

We Could Have Used This Sooner!

The only major criticism we have is this: why did they have to wait until now until launching? We realize that there are still several days until the actual Election Day, but this information would have been great to have a bit earlier. Given that absentee ballot forms have deadlines prior to Election Day and many states have already started the early voting process, it's a shame this web site wasn't available sooner. However, now that the site is ready, we look forward to using it for many years to come.

"Democrats outnumber Republicans 5-to-1 on Facebook and 3-to-1 on MySpace, said Bentley College professor Christine Williams, who studies online politics."

So far Barack Obama has 299,000 supporters on MySpace and Facebook, compared to 169,000 for Hillary Clinton. John Edwards ranks third among Democrats with 64,000 supporters, says the Washington Post - noting that Edwards is also using lesser-known social networks like Ning, Bebo and Care2.

Proving how web 2.0 hip he is, Obama even has a digg profile! Although judging by the amount of homepages he has (zero), Obama has my luck getting to the digg frontpage.

CNN Election Center 2008

In our opinion, CNN has by far the slickest and easiest to navigate election site out of all the major mainstream news media sources. They have a well designed, easy to navigate, and clearly laid out page that puts a wealth of information at your fingertips, including live election results, delegate counts, entrance and exit polls, candidate overviews, money charts, and general election info. If you're looking for just the straight state-by-state results, USA Today does a great job.

Politweets

Politweets is our favorite Twitter politics mashup. Last month we said that, "For political junkies, Politweet will be a must monitor web-site on every primary date this season until we know who the candidates for the general election are." Assuming Twitter can keep the lights on, Politweets will again be a must watch site throughout the day. Also check out the SuperTuesday Twitter stream from the Virtual Vantage Points blog.

Google Super Tuesday Map

In an effort to make sure Twitter goes down, Google has also teamed up with the service to create a maps mashup that shows Twitter updates about the primaries as they come in from across the country. It will display election results down to the county level after the returns are in, as well. The Google News team also slapped together an election gadget so you can embed state-by-state results on your web page.

YouTube YouChoose Super Tuesday

YouTube has a Google Maps mashup of their own that will aggregate and post geolocated videos throughout the day from candidates, news organizations, and YouTubers. The coverage isn't really restricted to Super Tuesday states, but it is still worth checking out -- many times the citizen journalist view is clearer than the one you get via mainstream sources.

MTV Choose or Lose Street Team

Speaking of citizen journalism, MTV's Street Team has citizen journalists dispatched to 23 Super Tuesday states to upload live and recorded mobile videos and blog posts throughout the day (absent is a representative from West Virginia, whose primary is actually May 13 -- the Republican party is awarding some delegates today via a statewide convention, however). Last week we called MTV's online election coverage a coup for citizen journalism.

Newsweek Live Webcast: Inside Super Tuesday

If mainstream journalism is more your thing, then Newsweek has you covered on the web. The magazine, along with owner the Wasington Post, is trotting out the heavy hitters for six continuous hours of live streaming web video coverage. Bob Woodward, Ben Bradlee, Sally Quinn, Howard Kurtz, and Leonard Downie will participate, with Newsweek editor Jon Meacham anchoring from Washingtonpost.com's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. WaPo and Newsweek reporters Michael Isikoff, Howard Fineman, Jonathan Alter, and others, including those from online magazine Slate, will contribute reports throughout the evening. Newsweek's operation is aiming to bring the name appeal and polish of broadcast news to the web. We'll see if it works.

Memeorandum

From the maker of Techmeme, Gabe Rivera's political memetracker keeps a pulse on the political blogosphere. It's a safe bet everyone will be buzzing about Super Tuesday today, but what are the individual storylines that will no doubt permeate the coverage? Following the related and discussion links on Memeorandum will let you find out. For a broader view of what people are talking about on the blogosphere, check out PoliticalTrends.info.

While overall blog mentions of Obama and McCain varied greatly during the last year (and we can't say if those were positive or negative posts), close to 500 million blog postings mentioned him since the beginning of the conventions at the end of August. During the same time period, only about 150 million blog posts mentioned McCain (though it would also be interesting to see similar statistics for Governor Palin as well).

Twitter and MySpace

On social networks, Obama also held a clear lead, with 844,927 MySpace friends compared to McCain's 219,404. Just between November 3rd and November 4th (election day), Obama gained over 10,000 new friends, while McCain only gained about 964. On Twitter, Obama gained 2865 new followers between the 3rd and 4th (for a total of 118,107), while John McCain's Twitter account only has a paltry 4942 followers in total.

There are, of course, a lot of reasons for why Barack Obama's campaign gained a lot more traction on social networks and blogs than the McCain campaign. The demographics of social media users tend to fall in line more closely with those of today's Democratic voters, for example. However, looking forward to the next campaign cycle, it seems clear that all political campaigns, especially at this level, will start ignoring social media trends at their own peril.

See also: Obama's Social Media Advantage, Act II

The presidential elections in Iran are being held on June 12, 2009 and will be the country's 10th such election. There are 3 leading candidates right now. Incumbant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is running against Iran Reform Movement candidate and former Prime Minister Mousavi. Former Speaker of the Majlis (Parliament) Mehdi Karroubi, another Reformist candidate, also intends to run.

As All Facebook's Nick O'Neill puts it, "unfortunately for the Iranians, they have a regime in place that doesn't support freedom of speech and would prefer to run a dictatorship". Those of us who enjoy such freedoms should do our part to make sure that censorship like this never happens to us. We wish our brothers and sisters in Iran the best of luck.

Facebook Response:

When we first learned of this story we immediately contacted Facebook to see what they had to say. They were gracious to respond swiftly with this comment from a Facebook spokesperson:

"We are disappointed to learn of reports that users in Iran may not have access to
Facebook, especially at a time when voters are turning to the Internet as a source
of information about election candidates and their positions. We are investigating
these reports.

We believe that people around the world should be able to use Facebook to
communicate and share information with their friends, family and coworkers. It is
always a shame when a countries' cultural and political concerns lead to limits
being placed on the opportunity for sharing and expression that the Internet
provides."