ReadWriteWeb

There's no question this year that Barack Obama and Ron Paul are the kings of US politics on the Internet. They both command the lion's share of their party's attention online and seem to dominate social networking and social media sites. So why is only one of those campaigns actually working? How come only Obama has been able to translate his online success to success at the polls? We thought we'd take a brief look today at the Obama campaign and why it has been successful, while citizens in 24 US states head to the polls as part of "Super Tuesday."

UPDATE: Also check out Keeping Tabs on Super Tuesday, our guide to following Super Tuesday via the Internet.

I went out to dinner last night, and when I came home and switched on my TV, John McCain had already won the Republican primary in New Hampshire. But on the Democratic side, it was too close to call -- just about 2300 votes separated Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, with the college town of Hanover still left to count. After I watched McCain's speech, I went downstairs to my office, and things were still too close to project a winner. I got absorbed in something and forgot to turn on the TV, but I kept my eye on a new site called Politweets.

Ah, what a difference a caucus makes. In November, when ABC and Facebook announced their partnership for US political coverage we, like many other tech pundits, expressed skepticism. We noted that polls on the Facebook politics section were drawing just around 1,000 participants -- "a microscopic number" compared to the 17 million US members of voting age on the site (now over 18 million). But just over a month later, things seem to have turned around completely.

The use of social networking and web-based organizing tools in politics has been a major story over the past year (in fact, we named it as our 6th most important story of 2007). Tonight, when a number of Iowans gather to decide who they think should represent the two major US political parties in the upcoming presidential election, we will begin to see if all that web campaigning paid off.

Web metrics firm Compete released their latest "Candidate FaceTime" metric yesterday, which measures how many hours people are spending across the social networking profiles of US presidential candidates. Not surprisingly, Ron Paul continues to dominate all candidates, while Barack Obama leads the pack among Democrats. The biggest surprise is the rise of Mike Huckabee -- who has also been rising in national polls -- perhaps due to the Chuck Norris bump (what can't that guy do?). Compete, however, points to Meetup as the true secret weapon.