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Omid Reza Misayafi, one of a number of Iranian bloggers arrested for "insulting" the government and religious authorities in that country, is dead. Misayafi's death was reported on Global Voices Online via an Iranian human rights site in Farsi and we learned of it from The Committee to Protect Bloggers.

No cause of death is yet known, but the Committee says torture of bloggers is common in Iran and they are usually placed in close proximity to the most dangerous criminals in any facility. Misayafi was sentenced in December to 30 months in prison "for insulting Islamic Republic Leaders." The man said he was a cultural blogger, not a political one, and only wrote a few satirical articles that got him into trouble.

Few topics are galvanizing the American public right now like the stimulus bill and how the stimulus money will be spent. ShovelWatch is a joint project of not-for-profit news organization ProPublica, PRI's The Takeaway, and WNYC Radio that plans to track the "stimulus from bills to building." ShovelWatch currently aggregates the best stories about the stimulus bill from all three sites and will feature more original reporting from citizens in the future. The site also features some of the most informative infographics about the stimulus bill.

It's Presidents Day here in the United States but for most people it's just a day off work. Cynics, fair-weather political watchers, "Joe Six Packs" (did you want to avoid hearing that phrase again?) - we present to you below some of our favorite online resources for casual political awareness. We'd suggest that these sites will facilitate a basic foundation of day-to-day political awareness.

These are our favorites, we'd love to hear your suggestions as well.

We've written a lot about how Barack Obama's Internet strategy was a significant reason for his success last year - first in the Democratic nomination, then the Presidential election. We've analyzed how the Obama campaign made masterful use of social media and we've commented on Obama's use of the Internet as President - not to mention the rise of the goverati. Tonight we came across an extensive presentation about Obama's overall Internet strategy. We think it's well worth a read, so we've embedded it below.

Today Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. As several million people attended the inauguration in Washington D.C., Facebook and CNN invited the rest of the world to watch the moment online. Online visitors to CNN.com were able to use its video player to watch the live broadcast coverage of the event. We also saw what has be one of the most brilliant examples of the real-time web in action: next to the video, the Facebook status updates of those watching streamed by in the sidebar.