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.

Some say there are only seven basic literary plots in all the stories in the world. Likewise, you can boil down most Facebook updates into a handful of types – and I think many users would love to be able to filter out at least five of those types.

Now, maybe you're a sports, entertainment and political junkie that is having a terrible Monday and wants everyone to repost a chain status. What kind of updates would you dismiss if you had a way to sort them out completely?

"It was a pure financial investment with economic objectives," Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, Chairman of Kingdom Holding Company, told CNN. "Politics has no ingredients whatsoever in that investment ... the secure economic financial investment with expected huge returns to our company Kingdom Holding."

Alwaleed, who also has a stake in Apple, said he expects the computer maker to thrive despite last year's death of Steve Jobs.

Initially, some analysts suggested Alwaleed was interested in obtaining a stake in Twitter because of the role it played in the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and northern Africa. Alwaleed also holds an interest in News Corp., prompting speculation he may have played a role in Rupert Murdoch's decision to start using Twitter late last year.

At the time of his acquisition, Alwaleed's investment in Twitter amounted to a 3% stake, based on a $800 million valuation of the company last August. While Alwaleed prides himself on being an early investor in Apple, Amazon and eBay, he said he did not see himself as an early investor in Twitter.

"We don't believe we came in at the early stage, but clearly we don't believe we came in at the plateau stage," he said. "We see that this company's viability and its continuity and its resilience will be there in the decades to come."

Interestingly, Spot Runner also just started offering political ads. The difference, though, is that while Spot Runner is targeting local elections -- making it easier for a person running for, say, a town council seat to run a television ad -- VoterVoter.com is talking national politics. The purpose of VoterVoter.com is for individuals to run ads supporting or attacking Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, or John McCain -- who each have their own section in the site's ad library.

What's the point of paying to run an ad in support of your favorite candidate rather than just giving directly to the campaign? According to VoterVoter.com the reason is that you can get around the Federal Election Commission's $4,600 campaign donation cap per candidate. "Because you are not contributing to a campaign, but are making your own choice on how to spend your money, your independent expenditure is not limited," reads the site's FAQ.

Another reason, one that VoterVoter.com doesn't mention, is that by bypassing your candidate's official campaign, you're free to engage in dirty politics that candidates generally try to avoid. Anyone up for a little swiftboating?

As The Nation notes, MoveOn.org recently launched a pro-Barack Obama TV commercial contest, with the winning ad to be aired nationally. VoterVoter.com will allow any ad to find its way on the air -- which may not be a good thing. One one hand, it does put more power in the hands of the people to influence American politics, but on the other hand, it also makes it easier for partisan organizations to engage in smear campaigns, which is exactly the type of politics we should be working to eliminate, not encourage.

What do you think of VoterVoter.com? Does it add to the political process or make things worse? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Obviously, we can't really know if the fact that somebody follows somebody else actually means that they are reading all the updates and the political Twittersphere is arguably a bit larger than the sample that Sysomos looked at here. For this study, Sysomos only looked at accounts that had over 5,000 followers and the team acknowledges that it had to make some editorial choices to keep the study manageable. The fact that the map of all the connections between the 168 accounts weighs in at 16 MB shows the complexity of this study, so some editorial control was obviously necessary.

Here are some of the highlights from the report:

The President

With over 2.33 million followers, President Barack Obama is the most followed politician on Twitter, though he is only being followed by 56 members of the 168-member political Twittersphere. Among Obama's followers are Al Gore, Portland's Mayor Sam Adams, London's Mayor Boris Johnson and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Newt Gingrich also follows Obama's updates, as does blogger Marc Parent (@mparent77772)

There is probably a reason why relatively few political influencers follow Obama. After all, if you want updates from the president, his Twitter account is probably one of the worst ways of following him and most of the updates on Obama's account aren't very interesting. Other politicians like Schwarzenegger and John Boehner also update their accounts far more regularly.

Politicians and Political Reporters

Among politicians and reporters, ABC News' George Stephanopoulos follows 105 members of the 168-member political Twittersphere Sysomos analyzed, followed by the Newshour (104), followed by John Boehner (98), the Huffington Post (98), and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (92).

Within the political Twittersphere, Schwarzenegger is also the most followed politician and Stephanopoulos is the most followed media personality.

Daryl Cagle, the cartoonist for MSNBC.com, is the #1 media personality that other reporters follow on Twitter.

News Organizations

Besides looking at individual reporters, Sysomos also examined the larger news organizations in the US. CNN's Breaking News account (@cnnbrk) has over 2.75 million followers, followed by NPR Politics (@nprpolitics) with 1.51 million and Good Morning America (@gma) with 1.37 million. CNN doesn't really follow anybody back, though, while the NPR Politics account follows close to 117,000 Twitter users and Newsweek (@newsweek) follows 97,000.

The members of the political Twittersphere as identified by Sysomos that are most likely to be followed are the PBS Newshour account, the Huffington Post and the LA Times.

A project of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation, OpenCongress is a site that anyone even remotely interested in politics should see.

OpenCongress makes it easy to track particular bills, topics and congresspeople by RSS, a tracking page or an embeddable widget (see below, for example). A personal account can be created easily with OpenID, there's a perfect amount of AJAX making the site a joy to navigate and all kinds of outside news and data is pulled into the site, rated by users and actively discussed.

The widget above, about a particular bill in congress, is just one of many widgets you can choose from.

I don't usually pay much attention to politics, but within five minutes I built and subscribed to an RSS feed displaying the most recent votes of congresspeople from my area, news stories and blog posts about them and news about a few bills of particular interest to me.

I voted in favor of one bill myself and left a comment on the site about it. There were already a couple of other comments on the same bill and though most of them were worthless - I could hide those ones by turning up the rating criteria on a slider!

This is a really well put-together site that makes me want to pay attention to politics because the user experience is so smooth and compelling.

continued below

Dream Features

What more could OpenCongress offer? There's so much there it's impossible not to ask for more - it really feels like the people behind the site might deliver it! I'd love to see live embedded video of discussions about bills of interest to me and IM alerts when those discussions are about to happen.

Right now the site uses Technorati to bring in blog posts about any bill you're looking at and then users click back to the site to rate the posts they've read. It would be nice to see some AideRSS integration so that we could subscribe to just the most commented on and linked-to posts in that feed.

Finally, I'd like to be able to configure what gets delivered in the feed I subscribe to; an option to opt-out of certain information sources like news stories would probably work best.

More fun with Congress

See also this cute little widget the Sunlight Foundation launched yesterday, displaying the most used word of the day on the floor of congress. Very interesting! A tag cloud is in the works and at that point it will prove of more actual use. Congress - it's not just for stuffy people any more!

"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.

In the future, the company plans to let people subscribe to topics the same way you can subscribe to communities. The aggregated information stream from subscribed topics will be presented in a new profile tab, "New in My World." You can check out some topics here: web 2.0, politics, lifestream. Some screenshots are below.

On the web, Facebook's debate promo site wasn't very impressive. There was a live comment wall, but with 30,000 comments logged over the course of the night and no context, it felt like trying to watch every Twitter stream on the web at once. In short: it was overwhelming and a bit dizzying.

But even so, things have really picked up on Facebook's political page. ABC is reporting that 1 million users have added their US politics application. It is unclear whether this number is post debate or overall (I'm thinking likely, overall) and because it is an officially sponsored application, Facebook doesn't offer usage metrics for it. But, regardless, the politics section of the site has clearly picked up steam since November. Most polls are now receiving around 10,000 votes and as Obama showed in Iowa, at least on the Democratic side, it might be possible to take some of that Internet support and make it count in the elections. According to a scientific ABC/Facebook poll, 40% of respondents get political information on the Internet, and 2/3rds of those say that information is important in deciding who to vote for.

Why the turn around? Barack Obama might be the reason. Obama has long been the most popular candidate on Facebook. He now has over 210,000 supporters on the site -- up 4,000 since just last night -- and commands 61% of the Democratic attention. His popularity on the site grew almost 20% following his pivotal win in Iowa last week. As we noted after the Iowa caucuses, much of Obama's support in the state came from young voters (under the age of 29), and not surprisingly the majority of US Facebook users are also under the age of 29 (according to their ad targeting tool).

These numbers paint an incredibly rosy picture for Barack Obama, Ron Paul (who has a commanding lead among Facebook Republicans) and Mike Huckabee (who has surged from 8.74% support in November to 18.75% today). Of course, the Republicans will need to get more young voters to the polls than they did in Iowa (where 80% of young voters caucused with the Democrats) in order for Paul to benefit from his online support. (Huckabee, perhaps, has less invested in the youth vote because he also does well in national polls and among evangelical Christian voters.)

Update: We should probably also mention that the ABC-Facebook debate was the most watched of the election cycle to date. The 9.36 million viewers for the Democratic portion nearly triples the most watched Dem debate so far. 2.9 million were in the 25-54 demo -- again nearly triple the previous best. Certainly some of the viewer bump can be attributed to how late in the election cycle we are (this debate may have been perceived as more important). But perhaps Facebook did help push viewers to ABC.

In a blog post tagged Goodbye, Jake Parrillo of Google's Politics & Elections Team shut down the 2.5 year old Public Sector and Elections Lab blog and announced the launch of the company's new Google Politics and Elections Team Blog. The new blog will expand coverage of Google's growing activities aimed at increasing voter engagement.

From Google Moderator to live YouTube to the company's work analyzing search terms durring debates and more - there's a lot that Google can do to engage with elections, all of it connected by the social thread of fast-growing social network Google Plus.

Recent blog posts on the new Google Elections blog have focused on search trends around the Republican candidate debates and Google's participation in the global Open Government Partnership project.

The company today announced a contest for members of the public who could identify interesting political trends in Google search data.

While the creation of tools to encourage public analysis and engagement with elections might be framed as a non-partisan activity, at least in the United States it would probably be naive to understand it that way.

That young votes are more likely to be involved with politics online is an advantage for Democrats, because young voters tend to lean toward presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama, according to Pew. Obama's supporters are more web savvy than those of his competitors, and even though the study found that just 6% of American's have given to a presidential campaign via the web, Barack Obama's record haul owes a far greater percentage to online contributions. Just 2% of Americans gave online during the last presidential election. Given the increased web involvement of the millennial generation, we can probably expect 2012 to be another record setting cycle in terms of online involvement and fundraising.

However, is all this information gathering shifting online a good thing? Americans aren't so sure. While 22% of Americans say that they wouldn't even be involved with a campaign in any way if not for the Internet, 35% feel that the web magnifies the most extreme voices, which can "drown out average people's views." And a majority of Americans surveyed feel that the web is full of propaganda and misinformation that too many people believe.

We noted last week that the echo chamber effect of the blogosphere has a way of making rumors go wild and have far-reaching consequences outside of the web. That said, it is exciting that such a large percentage of Americans are now using the web to seek primary sources that were previously unavailable or hard to attain. Whereas in the past people had to rely on information filtered by reporters, now voters are able to use the web to find videos, transcripts and position papers to see the quotes in context, so to speak -- and then offer their own opinions back to fellow voters. That has to be a net positive.

I wrote in June about how Google was changing the American political landscape, and that will not be more evident than tonight when eight Democratic presidential hopefuls take the stage in South Carolina -- a crucial early primary state -- for a debate sponsored by CNN and YouTube in which all of the questions were submitted by users of YouTube. The Republicans get their chance in September.

"On the surface, this format seems like a revolution in citizen participation in presidential politics, and it could inject some life into the drab debate format that -- let's be honest -- excites neither the candidates nor the audience.

But cool technology on big screens is only half (or less) of the technological revolution -- it's really all about the people. To be sure, it's great that YouTube and CNN are involving the YouTube community in this effort. But there's a glaring omission: CNN will be the sole arbiters of what videos are shown and questions are asked. This format is contrary to what YouTube's community of users -- and other online communities like it at Digg, Facebook, MySpace, and elsewhere -- are used to." -- TechPresident.

On the other hand, the YouTube questioners add a human element, that could inject some poignant moments into the debate. "Before asking the candidates how they'd cut preventive health care costs, Kim, 36, removes her wig and says, 'I hope to be a... breast-cancer survivor,'" notes today's issue of Newsweek about a potential questioner who is a cancer patient. That sort of moment is possible in the intimate town hall-style meetings that candidates often attend on their own, but rarely could something like that happen in a nationally televised debate.

For myself, I tend to agree with Harrison Hoffman at Webware who points out that "the fact that this debate is even happening just goes to show the enormous impact that user generated-content has had on society." Though certainly a bit gimmicky, and unfortunately not fully embracing web 2.0 by letting the community self moderate the content, this debate is an important step for user generated content, if perhaps not for politics. As an American, however, I am a bit concerned by the number of video questions asked by puppets (I counted 4 in a quick perusal of around 50 videos).

The Pirate Party, which was was originally founded in Sweden in 2006, is a political party whose platform is built around issues like reforming copyright and patent law, digital privacy and radical government transparency. The organization "promotes in particular an enhanced transparency of government by implementing open source governance and providing for APIs to allow for electronic inspection and monitoring of government operations by the citizen," according to its Wikipedia entry.

The party is no stranger to controversy. It is loosely linked to the Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent tracker whose operators were prosecuted for copyright infringement in 2009. It also donated server space to WikiLeaks as other ISPs have booted the organization from their servers.

Its Berlin upset marks the biggest electoral win yet for the party, which won two seats in the European Parliament in 2009. Their German victory is politically significant within the country because of the blow it delivers to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's governing coalition and because it secures federal funding for the party. While they're still a minority, the win gives them enough seats to have a say in the regional government.

What Does It Mean For the Web's Role in Politics?

Its meaning beyond the country's borders may be even more significant, even if the party's popularity fails to spread beyond a few European countries. If nothing else, it demonstrates the role that the Internet and issues related to the digital realm can play in electoral politics.

For example, much has been made of the growing impact the Web has had on U.S. politics, especially during the 2008 election, when Barack Obama's campaign used social media and Internet-based fundraising tools to mount an unexpected challenge to more established candidates. Yet, as the U.S. gears up for its next election cycle, its political system itself is largely unchanged, still dominated by the same two parties.

The apparent rise of the Pirate Party marks the first time that a political party has been successfully built on issues pertaining directly to the Internet and digital rights. Such matters are increasingly on the minds of voters everywhere, as people live more and more of their lives online. Even if upstart parties like this don't gain mainstream traction anywhere, they're bound to offer a few lessons to major party politicians, for whom the Web is now not only a crucial campaign tool but an important component of policy itself.

The Google.com/elections site's navigation allows browsing by candidate or issue. It also features a "Trends" browser, showing how candidates are doing in Google search, Google News mentions and YouTube views, and an 'On the Ground' viewer showing stories overlaid on a map.

Google began a concerted overhaul of its political resources in October. It shut down the previous incarnation, the Public Sector and Elections Lab, and launched the Google Politics and Elections Team. The new team planned to "build tools to connect voters to the electoral process."

In November, Google launched an election hub for Egypt, which held its first elections since longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak was ousted. Today's launch of the U.S. elections page offers a similar set of features to empower voters and enhance campaigns, all built on Google's platform of valuable Web tools.

Where do you get your campaign news?

Loomia is similar to Sphere and another app we reviewed recently, Apture. These services all aim to serve up more clickable content options on media websites - which means more user engagement and time spent on site for publishers.

We spoke to Loomia CEO David Marks and asked him how Loomia compares to Sphere, which at first glance appears to have much in common with Loomia. Marks said that Sphere is trying to do "semantic classification", i.e. analyzing the content of an article and recommending further content based on the findings. However Loomia focuses more on the user and so it does behavioral type recommendations. This can result in a more diverse set of topics, because users typically have a range of content preferences. It depends on the article though, said Marks.

Loomia currently has 2 types of deployment:

• Content (e.g. WSJ)
• Video (e.g. Brightcove)

Marks told ReadWriteWeb that video advertising is currently selling well for big media publishers. Accordingly these publishers typically now want to drive users to their videos - and Loomia has a widget to do that.

Marks told us that a lot of their publishers are "dollar focused" this year, therefore recommendations have become more than just an interesting feature on a website - they can drive more advertising dollars. As an example, Marks told us that a media website's Finance section may sell out with ads, but its Politics section may not (fairly common in big media websites). But the Politics section tends to get bigger page views, so to address the imbalance Loomia's recommendations widgets can drive users from Politics to Finance.

We've been looking at how recommendations are being used in the retail sector a lot, and Loomia is a neat example of how the same technology can have real value for the media segment. Let us know in the comments what other recommendation technologies have caught your eye in publishing.