ReadWriteWeb

"We're always looking to get as close to one touch donations as we can," Romney Campaign's Digital Director Zac Moffat told the LATimes.

Politico reports that both the Romney and Obama campaigns have started using Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's "magical" dongle, Square. Of course, you can't pay by saying your name as you now can at select merchants, but Square still makes campaign donations much faster and easier. Staff, field organizers and campaign volunteers hook up Square to their mobile phones and accept campaign donations on the spot.

So what just happened? Well, several of the world's most prominent Web destinations interrupted their regular programming to remind their readers of the dangers of a world where certain content may be arbitrarily made to disappear. For most Americans, this was probably the first they'd seen of any efforts by Congress to change the Internet, for whatever reason they'd want to do so.

They were given links to click on to learn more. Some of those links led to the White House Web site, where over a hundred thousand people signed petitions urging the President to veto any bill that would suborn Internet censorship. A few of those links led, to our own surprise, to ReadWriteWeb; and for a few hours yesterday, our traffic rose to unprecedented levels.

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.