Here are a few ways to dig into voting trends and tune into the results as they start pouring in tonight.

Also joining in on the fun of streaming live-video, The Wall Street Journal will be offering live coverage starting at 8 p.m. ET (UTC-5).

Even Facebook is getting into the election game this year, not only pushing its users to vote, but broadcasting live streaming video coverage of election results starting at 7 p.m. ET (UTC-5). You'll find its coverage on the official Facebook app.

For those of you who feel that live video is old hat, there are a number of online, interactive maps and tools that put together real-time results with spiffy looking graphics and plenty of information. The New York Times, for example, has a great election center that shows results drilled down on a national map. Talking Points Memo also has a great interactive map of the country showing Senate, House, governor and proposition results on a state-by-state basis.

If you want to dig even deeper into the election results, trends, voting issues and more, the Nieman Journalism Lab has a great guide to old and new media on election night, as does the Media Decoder blog on The New York Times.

Among other findings, mobile phone users voted more often than others, those votes were equally balanced between Republican and Democrat and young users were more often to use their mobile phones for political goals than others. Overall, 82% of American adults own a mobile and a quarter use them to connect politically, according to Pew.

"Mobile connectivity has become a growing feature in all kinds of communication and information exchanges--including politics--and mobile connectivity is becoming a regular feature of political campaigns."

71% of mobile phone owners say they voted in the 2010 election, compared with 64% of the greater adult population. 44% said they voted Democrat, 44% Republican, 2% other and 10% either didn't answer or said they didn't know.

Among other conclusions of the study are these.

• 14% of all American adults used their cell phones to tell others that they had voted.
• 12% of adults used their cell phones to keep up with news about the election or politics.
• 10% of adults sent text messages relating to the election to friends, family members and others.
• 6% of adults used their cells to let others know about conditions at their local voting stations on election day, including insights about delays, long lines, low turnout, or other issues.
• 4% of adults used their phones to monitor results of the election as they occurred.
• 3% of adults used their cells to shoot and share photos or videos related to the election.
• 1% of adults used a cell-phone app that provided updates from a candidate or group about election news.
• 1% of adults contributed money by text message to a candidate or group connected to the election like a party or interest group.

Since this was the first survey of mobile use in politics during a mid-term election, Pew has no prior data to compare, but the youth of political mobile users indicates a likely growth in the importance of mobile communication and campaigning in future elections.

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.

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.

As the election gears up, the site's content will include articles, video series and interactive maps and polls. BBC.com averages 17.4 million unique visitors per month from the U.S., about a third of the site's global audience. Big news months, such as in May, when Osama bin Laden was killed, drew more than 19 million readers.

BBC North America editor Claudia Milne will run the site. It will feature reporting from Milne's colleague, Mark Mardell, as well as Katty Kay, anchor of the BBC World News America TV program. That show will be a platform for cross-promotion with the website.

"We don't expect people to come to the BBC as the first port of call for their coverage," says Milne, "but we offer a different perspective." The BBC wants its outside viewpoint and impartiality to balance out the blood sport in U.S. media. "The way the American media are going to cover this election campaign, there will be a lot of heat," says Milne. "We're going to shed a little bit of light."

The BBC isn't the only British news organization vying for Americans' attention this election season. In September, The Guardian launched a U.S. homepage, and it's staffing up a U.S. newsroom.

Visit BBC.com's U.S. elections page at BBC.com/USelection.

Where do you go for your election news?

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.

The story is interesting because the candidates still purchase TV ad time and appear at various campaign events, but it made me think those many years ago when I first read it how ridiculous our whole political process is. And no matter what party affiliation you might have at the moment, you probably agree that things could be improved. Though I am not sure that a Multivac automating the voting process as Asimov foretold would be much of an improvement.

It does seem as if the computers, or at least the predictive process, has taken a front seat to the actual plebiscite itself. We limit the predictions by the networks until after the polls close in each time zone, with the curious result that at the top of each hour on election night there is a rash of races that have been called by each network's computers. Some of these predictions proved spectacularly wrong, as was the case of Florida during the 2000 election. All that matters is what is produced for our viewing pleasure.

In Asimov's story, Norman, our "typical" voter, has a conflict. He has to tell the truth (Multivac of course monitors his bio-signs to ensure that he isn't lying). He is physically ill the night before the election, realizing his burden is large. His family is terrified, because police surrounds his house. This is to ensure that he isn't harmed on the way to the polling place, where he can discharge his civic duty.

Now, embarrassingly among modern democracies, we Yanks are at the very bottom of voter turnout. Wikipedia lists us below 50% here. There are some countries, such as Australia and Brazil, where voting is compulsory. Austria and Italy, where it isn't, have better than 90% turnout rates. And given the number of governments in Italy, they vote fairly often too.

So think about the Egyptians who are voting for the first time in their lives this week and if you aren't yet registered to vote, take some time to do so. Consider yourself fortunate that Norman and the Multivac haven't replaced you quite yet.

And you can find Franchise in a variety of short story collections if you want to give it a read.

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.

To help out as the New Hampshire primary rolls around, Storify has put together 10 lessons from the Iowa Caucus for using social media to report on elections. Storify is the front page of social media news, and its curation tools are employed by all kinds of major media companies. Storify's list of election coverage strategies also includes some news. Storify has just released a search tool in beta, allowing users to search across previously "Storified" elements to embed them in your stories.

On the night of the Iowa Caucus, news organizations raced to keep up with the Web to report results, but social media are always hard to filter for quality information. Storify's tools helped news organizations like the New York Times, PBS Newshour and the Des Moines Register tune in to the signal and filter out the noise. "It was deadline curation at a new level," says Storify's Jeff Elder.

Here are Storify's 10 tips. Pay special attention to the golden rules at the end.

Google has also launched an extensive Egyptian elections page full of info on candidates, major issues and polling stations. The information is provided by Egypt's Higher Elections Committee, but Google's page enhances the content with Google News, Maps and its other election tools. Google is building tools and programs to improve elections around the world, and this landmark election in Egypt is a storybook example of Web technology as a force for open and accountable government.

The Mubarak regime tried, even as it fell, to restrict access to Web services in Egypt in order to contain the uprising. It first blocked Twitter, then Facebook and Google services, and then it went for a full-on Internet blackout. The Internet struck back, though. Anonymous targeted Mubarak's regime websites, and hackers and bloggers in Egypt and around the world lent their support, even facing arrest.

Google lent its support, too, featuring YouTube videos of the uprisings. The extensive resources Google offers Egyptian voters on its elections page today follow through on that support with an effort to make democracy better through Web technology.

You can read more about Google's celebration of this historic election on the Google blog.

Of course, statements about net neutrality's death hardly seem new. Its demise has been predicted for months, particularly after a Federal Appeals Court's decision this spring challenged the FCC's authority to stop Comcast from throttling P2P traffic.

Some analysis following last week's election has tried frame the Democrats' loss, in part, as a referendum on net neutrality, with Verizon going so far as tweeting that every Democratic candidate that supported the PCCC's net neutrality pledge lost their election.

But as Techdirt's Mike Masnick counters, these particular candidates were not incumbents and were largely running in Republican strongholds. Furthermore, some Democrats who signed anti-net neutrality pledges also lost their election bids. "Sorry," says Masnick, "net neutrality simply was not an important issue in this year's election." Rather, there were plenty of other reasons why Democratic candidates lost seats. ("It's the economy, stupid.")

If Congress Won't Do Anything about Net Neutrality, Will the FCC?

Regardless, net neutrality does remain an important issue. And while the Republicans will control Congress, Democrats do still hold a majority of FCC seats. "The ball is clearly in the FCC's court now," said Art Brodsky, communications director for Public Knowledge, a digital rights group supporting new net neutrality rules, in an interview with Computerworld. However, when the FCC published the agenda for its November Open Meeting, discussions of net neutrality did not make the docket.

So with or without the support of Congress, it remains to be seen whether the FCC will move forward to address net neutrality, or whether it will simply focus its efforts on its National Broadband Plan, something that seems less contentious and that has more bipartisan support.

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.