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Ahead of the Iowa Caucuses, Google has launched its U.S. elections hub. The site features news, calendars, maps and videos, as well as online tools campaigns, organizers and reporters can use. The Google Politics & Elections Google+ page will share the latest updates.

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.

Led by social media leaders like Chris Hughes of Facebook, Obama managed to run circles around the Republican nominee, Arizona Senator John McCain. Whereas the Internet was only a secondary concern for McCain, Obama made the web a central part of his campaign. As such, it wasn't much of a surprise that Obama had more than 20 times as many Twitter followers than McCain at the time of the election. This helps to at least partially explain the $150 million fundraising advantage that Obama had during the 2008 presidential election.

The New York Times released a new iPhone app this afternoon and it looks great - if you're a Times subscriber at $15 per month. Will a large number of people pay that much to access high quality content about the public interest in a mobile app? I'm not so sure they will. Maybe that doesn't matter though.

The app is nicely designed and integrates a wide variety of features, some of which are available for free. It's both cool and very frustrating. Why aren't more apps like this? Why is the paper of record paywalling its best content about a subject of such great public importance?

Egyptians go to the polls today to vote in the first election since the ouster of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. Egypt was a flashpoint in the so-called Arab Spring this year, a string of popular uprisings in which the Web and mobile technology played crucial and unprecedented roles. Google is celebrating this historic event with an election-day doodle on its Egypt's Google homepage.

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.

This weekend, Alexander Lukashenko won a fourth term as president of Belarus. Official statements that he received nearly 80% of the vote have been met by the West decrying flaws and violent clashes involving thousands of protesters that have turned out into the streets. Eight of the 10 opposition candidates are reported to have been arrested, along with hundreds of protesters. As the government of Belarus cracks down, the Web is waking up to the news. Here are online windows into what's happening.

"Technology is the equalizer," Fareed Zein told Fast Company. Zein has built the Sudan Vote Monitor as a platform people can use to monitor and cover next month's independence vote in that northeastern African country.

To the south and east, another technological experiment has risen, that one to commemorate the fait accompli of the Rwandan genocide. The Genocide Archive of Rwanda, hosted by the Kigali Genocide Memorial, will document the 100 days and 800,000 lives lost in the brutality of 1994.

The aftermath of Iran's election last week was startling. From the eyebrow-raising lopsided vote tally, to the surge of protesters into the streets, to the pivotal role of tools like mobile phones, Twitter, and YouTube in getting the story out, it's hard to say what's been the most remarkable.

Lately, there has been a trend for government agencies and elected officials to put their videos up on YouTube. While we commend them for doing so, we can't help but wonder if this is, in the end, a positive trend. After all, while YouTube is definitely the most popular video sharing site, it is definitely not the only one. Yet, as we reported this morning, Congress is putting its videos on the site now, and President-elect Barack Obama is also making regular appearances on Google's popular video sharing service.