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.

Barack Obama has been leading the way on social media, giving the most interactive State of the Union address ever on Jan 24. It featured a Twitter hashtag and the entire speech was streamed on WhiteHouse.gov/SOTU. The White House also hosted a Google+ Hangout on Jan 30, which our own Jon Mitchell attended and blogged about. Sure, it might have been fun to hangout with the Prez, but unless you were one of the five Americans who actually hung out with him live, Mitchell reports, the experience felt just like television. Obama first launched as a Google+ brand, not a profile, late last year. Not long ago, the president joined Instagram.

Yes, it's pretty awesome that the Obama campaign is using Square, the oh-so-popular mobile photo app Instagram and the Google+ hangout feature. But we are at a point now where social media tools and mobile payments are hardly a novelty. Instead, they are accepted and necessary modes of communication. Will Square help raise more funds for Obama and Romney? Or is it just another payment option for the few?

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.

Whenever you divert a river through a narrow channel, the result is always raging and torrential. Google, Wikipedia, several blogs published through WordPress and Tumblr, and a few other sites yesterday successfully stuck a few logs in the river. They diverted people's attentions for a moment, and got quite a few of them to agree that changes in the Internet to divert traffic away from content (except for this one) are usually bad.

The result was a logjam of public support, a signal of concerted public opposition to government altering the mechanism of the Internet. Principal sponsors of the SOPA and PROTECT-IP (PIPA) legislation publicly withdrew their support of both bills in their respective houses. Now, despite new markup hearings scheduled for next month, it is extremely unlikely that anti-piracy legislation will emerge from Congress this term.

Victory, it would seem, for the SOPA and PIPA opponents. But we need to ask ourselves, do millions of Internet users truly know more today about the efforts to preserve the Internet and the industries that depend on it, than they did 48 hours ago? Or did Google and Wikipedia just present everyone with yet another popup (like the one with the green button and the red button where the green one says, "YES, I'M 18 OR OVER") and people click the one closest to the content they're really looking for.

But you can surely step in it once

You've often told us this yourself: We in the media are too full of ourselves; we think we're so clever. We can stick our foot in the river, and when it changes direction we proclaim ourselves God and say we, too, can change the course of mighty rivers. We're always trying to make ourselves "mainstream," and we scratch and claw for any means necessary to have Google make us "mainstream."

But we typically fail to keep track of where the river goes from here. Which makes the report this morning from Nikki Finke of Deadline Hollywood an ominous and foreboding indicator of future events for anyone preparing a "Mission: Accomplished" banner for the victory party. Finke cites an "anonymous" memo from an unnamed Hollywood studio executive (who, despite not being named, openly states he produced a TV series called "24") as making clear that Hollywood's campaign contributions are not guaranteed to anyone. After last Saturday's statement from the Obama Administration, the content industry may be rethinking its support for Democratic Party fundraising efforts in the near-term.

Hollywood, which is in California, the home state of Rep. Darrell Issa, who has become the loudest SOPA opponent in the House. California, with 55 electoral votes. The state where recent polls expressed a preference for that nice fellow who worked with Hollywood to help produce the Salt Lake City Olympics.

In the two decades-plus that I've covered anti-piracy legislation in the U.S., as well as other countries, I've provided the nasty details, the ironic twists, the points of conflict where the legal, creative, and technology worlds fail to connect. And in all of that time, I've been told by editors (when I've had editors), and even frequently by some readers, that folks like you simply don't care. I can still hear the words of one editor who hosted a media workshop resounding in my head: "The Internet is not about facts," he said. "It's about traffic. And you don't get traffic by publishing a bunch of facts, facts, facts, facts."

If anything is less about facts than that particular editor's view of the Internet, it's politics. You can't garner public support or opposition to an issue, I've been told, through a technical recitation of every use case. Instead, it's been suggested, to make an issue popular, you should boil it down to two words that fit on a protest sign. Case in point: Easily the most convincing explanation I've ever read about the potential effects of the anti-piracy system SOPA suggested comes from the blog of an ISP named SoftLayer. It's a detailed technical description of the mess that any DNS server would have to wade through if it were to be amended with instructions preventing it from resolving only certain domain name requests.

As an optimist, I'd think a reasonable person would come away from that blog post convinced that SOPA's suggested remedy was not viable. But you can't fit "DNS Pre-emption Would Break Name Resolution Cycles" on a campaign banner.

Insert cause here

You need something else. Up until 2009, the two-word slogan that anti-piracy opponents went with was "government conspiracy." (Which still made for a big protest sign.) Yet it did not resound with a broader audience, probably because none of the players in the alleged conspiracy had any direct relationship with you, the everyday user. It was all taking place in soundproofed, smoke-filled, underground bunkers, probably with Peter Sellers playing at least three roles.

What ended up working was something more like this: "Censorship bad."

And you know, it's true. Censorship bad. You don't want censorship? Of course not. Here's a nice popup for you. Click the button that says censorship bad. You can do it. Good boy.

Never mind that none of the bills are really about censorship. If they have the same effect, I've been told, it's the same thing. As you go forth about your business today, and as you take heart in the very probable fact that the Internet will not be ruined by an ill-considered bill from folks who didn't comprehend the technology, ask yourself this: How long will the Web maintain its integrity as a source of unfettered, unfiltered facts, facts, facts, facts as long as congresspeople, service providers, content providers, artists, publishers, journalists, political candidates, and you continue to let yourself be used as a tool for someone else's two-word-slogan, private interests?

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.