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.

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).

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.

We noted in August, that looking at YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook popularity predicted an eventual head-to-head between Ron Paul and Barack Obama. But in every national poll at the time, neither candidate came out on top. In November, the Compete "Candidate FaceTime" metric showed Paul and Mike Huckabee way out in front, with Obama and Hillary Clinton leading on the Democratic side. The national poll results still don't bear out the online popularity. National polls still have Clinton way ahead of Obama, and Paul in a distant sixth place.

We've speculated that one reason might be that much of the attention anti-war candidates like Obama and Paul are receiving is coming from overseas -- where anti-war and anti-Bush sentiment is generally greater than in the US. American politics are profoundly important across the globe, so people outside of the US pay attention, but though their votes in online straw polls and visits to candidate MySpace pages are counted, they cannot vote in US elections and are left out of local polling.

Yesterday, Hitwise released numbers showing which candidate's official web site was most popular among Iowans. That means these numbers can't be influenced by people from other countries -- this is the Internet election as predicted by the very people who caucus to start the process tonight.

Surprisingly, Iowa predicts wins for Barack Obama and Ron Paul -- both of whom received far more Internet visits from Iowa connected computers in the past month than their next closes rivals (Clinton and Huckabee, respectively). Hitwise is seeing similar results nationally (though with Paul and Huckabee ahead of Obama and Clinton). These results are in line with what the web has been telling us all year.

The latest polls out of Iowa, however, still disagree with what the web predicts. Real Clear Politics, which averages major polls to come up with a single number, shows a statistical dead heat in Iowa between Obama, Clinton, and John Edwards. On the Republican site, Huckabee and Mitt Romney are neck and neck, but Paul is sitting in 6th place, well out of contention.

So which is right? While Obama and Paul continue to rack up the wins online, the offline poll numbers show a tougher road to the White House for both. At this point, it's probably best to dispense with the predictions, and guesses, and analysis and wait to see who actually wins in the morning -- then we'll have a clearer picture of how much the Internet matters in campaign politics. At least until Tuesday, when we get to do it all over again in New Hampshire (where, incidentally, Hitwise shows John McCain and Mike Huckabee both leading Ron Paul, and the latest polls have McCain in the lead).

Image via: AAAS.

"There is a certain element of mob mentality (ala Digg) that may ... hinder actual progress," said commenter Megatron. "The internet is great for giving everyone a say, but it tends to bring out the wackos." While commenter Morgan noted that you risk alienating many of your constituents if you pay too much attention to the type of people who would participate in a site like Oh Boy Obama -- which as we said would likely be the most fervent campaign supporters.

Kuhl's "Fix Washington" campaign is essentially the same idea -- a user generated political think tank -- but on a more local level. Dr. Denny at Scholars and Rogues isn't buying it. "Rep. Kuhl has reduced the American system of government to a reality game show," he wrote. "He's asking for his constituents to do his thinking for him."

However, like Oh Boy Obama, Kuhl's idea isn't necessarily a bad one -- though it does have faults. Kuhl is actually following two of our rules for crowdsourcing. He's realized that crowds are better at vetting content than creating it -- though he's asking for idea submissions, the real meat of his project is in letting users vote on the best from a preselected list. And therein lies his second smart move -- he's realized that not everything can be democratic and will be selecting the five top submissions himself.

Kuhl's idea also has the same problems as Oh Boy Obama. It's very unlikely that most of his constituents have ever even been to his web site, which means that the people submitting and voting on ideas are likely not the best representation of his district. Further, it will be interesting to see how he'll verify that the people voting on and submitting ideas actually are his constituents. However, as Tip O'Neill said, all politics is local. Kuhl's idea, while not perfect and perhaps just a publicity stunt, is a novel idea that puts a little extra legislative power in the hands of the voters at a local level... should they choose to participate. I'll be interested to see how it turns out.

So how has Netscape.com fared over the past year? Let's check that out...

1-year chart; digg = red, netscape = blue

This shows that Netscape has gone down a little since June 2006. It also shows that digg peaked around December 2006, but has dipped since then. Although the Compete.com stats (below) suggest that digg has continued upwards - perhaps some Alexa flakiness there.

The trends become clearer in the 3-year Alexa chart, which shows that Netscape has been on a deep spiral downward since the end of 2004. Since it was re-born June 2006, the downward trend has continued - but not so dramatically as prior to mid-2006:

3-year chart; digg = red, netscape = blue

Compete's data also shows that Netscape has bled users. As bloat! pointed out recently, it is a roughly similar % drop from Alexa.

Source: Compete

A fairer indication of success is to look at the site activity on Netscape.com. A scan of the frontpage shows healthy voting - not on the magnitude of digg, but still good. And the number of comments on the top stories is encouraging. For example the story Al Gore Son Arrested has 116 votes and 254 comments at the time I looked at it (and this is night time Independence Day in the US).

Interestingly, the Gadgets & Tech section of Netscape.com has very little activity. But a quick scan of the Top Stories page shows that the more mainstream stories, like Politics and News, are getting a respectable number of votes and comments. But not as much as digg - I'd estimate perhaps 10 times as less votes and/or comments on Netscape than on digg. Indeed the Al Gore's son story on digg has 1,103 votes and 298 comments at time of writing - which is probably a fair indication of the difference in active users between digg and Netscape.

How do you think Netscape has gone over the past year, since its controversial digg-like re-birth in mid 2006?

Both ABC and Facebook are late to the party. CNN and YouTube were the first told hold a new-meets-old media mashup debate (the Republican version will be held this week), and MySpace teamed with MTV for their ongoing candidate dialogues.

New media technologies are taking a bigger role in US election politics than they ever have, with candidates blogging, posting videos, using social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Twittering. A stop at the Googleplex for an interview with Eric Schmidt has become an almost required campaign event this election cycle, and even web tech-focused blogs like TechCrunch are getting in on the act by interviewing US presidential candidates (today they talked with Barack Obama).

For all the hype surrounding social networks, and even all the apparent buzz candidates can build on them, it is dubious whether there will be an actual benefit at the polls.

This is something we have noticed as well. In August, we wrote that though the Internet has provided a cost-effective way for candidates to get their message out, and has given a platform for long-shot candidates like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul that has allowed them to stay in the race, the numbers seem to indicate that Internet celebrity does not necessarily translate to the polls (though, with no ballots cast, we'll have to wait to see if that holds up).

The ABC Facebook page actually has a chart confirming some of these discrepancies by comparing support from the candidates' official Facebook pages to the results of a recent ABC News poll of likely voters. For both parties, the polled front-runner nationally is not the leader on Facebook (for Republicans the data is more out of sync than for Democrats). As a commenter surmised on our Web 2.0 Election post, this may have something to do with the international nature of social networks versus the domestically targeted nature of the presidential opinion polls.

Further, the most recently completed ABC News/Facebook political poll (asking What is "the number one issue [you] look at when evaluating Presidential candidates") drew just over 1,000 votes. With over 17 million users in the US over voting age (according to Facebook's ad targeting tool), 1,000 participants in an open poll is a microscopic number. To echo Caroline McCarthy, maybe ABC News can pull it off, but I'm incredulous.

What do you think? Can social networks really make an impact with political campaigns? Are ABC and Facebook too late to the party?

There are no major surprises in the reading lists of the two campaigns and it also needs to be noted that these are relatively small lists. John McCain's list is comprised of 26 feeds, while the Obama campaign only tracks 18 sources, including its own blog (and yes, somewhat predictably, McCain tracks Fox News and Obama the New York Times...). Overall, though, these reading lists are very conservative and mostly include the major, well known news organizations and large political blogs.

The setup of Power Readers in Politics is quite well done overall. Google completely avoids using any technical terms like RSS and OPML that might scare away users unfamiliar with feed reading. Instead, Google just offers users to subscribe to these reading lists in Google Reader. If this gets any traction, it might become a good way for Google to introduce more people to feed reading - but for that to happen, the campaigns will have to start sharing a bit more and may have to get a bit more adventurous in what items they share.

The conversation with Armstrong turned - several times - to that of politics. Was Armstrong in line to be named the "Cancer Czar" for the President-elect? Would he consider running for office after his athletic career was over? Armstrong shrugged off the questions, saying that cycling was most prevalent on his mind, currently.

Ego

Battelle and Armstrong spent a good portion of the conversation discussing ego, mind, and body in terms of Armstrong's success. In his opinion, mind greatly influences body and ego - good and motivational ego - has a great deal to do with that.

Clearly, no one thing helped Armstrong defeat cancer and win seven Tours, but it was more than just mental acuity. Or, as he stated when couching the need for a balance between the mental and physical: "A donkey will never win the Kentucky Derby." No matter how much that donkey wants to win.

Well known for his competitive spirit, Lance shared some insight into the internal forces that drive him and why, ultimately, he feels that "Winning is living. Losing is dying."

Twitter

The conversation took a decidedly techie bent when Battelle mentioned that Armstrong had been twittering from his phone back stage. Armstrong admitted that even with his brief use - less than two weeks - he found the service interesting.

The Twitter talk even revealed some of Armstrong's competitive side as he quipped that the "dude who runs the shoe store" had more followers than he did, referring to @Zappos, the Twitter account for Zappo's CEO Tony Hsieh.

Entrepreneurial Spirit

Armstrong has started livestrong.org, a non-profit designed to "inspire and empower people affected by cancer." And the efforts around that property helped drive him to found a for-profit company, livestrong.com, as well.

The .com organization focuses on any challenge facing health and healthy lifestyles, from smoking to obesity to disease, encouraging users to "Dare to change your life." In Armstrong's view, the ability to help people change their lives has the potential to reduce the number of health problems in the world today.

"If .com is successful enough," he said. ".org will be out of business."

A very charismatic and driven individual, Armstrong makes for an interesting interview. Battelle is clearly a fan and that lends a great chemistry to the conversation. Armstrong is among one of the most inspirational figures in modern sport - and that translates well into inspiring all of us.