Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee win the Iowa caucuses on a night of record turnouts, especially by youth voters; could Eventful demands be accurate predictors of primary results?; Elaine Young considers what effect social media may have had on last night's results; Ron Paul gets dissed, again, by the media; Chris Dodd and Joe Biden drop out, but Mike Gravel absolutely DID NOT; a new poll confirms that more Americans are getting their election news online; and what if the top GOP web consultants were trekkies?

Who will be America's first techPresident? It's time to grade the candidates on their understanding of the power of the internet to transform America's future. We start with the Democratic field...

The Giuliani Quote Generator Facebook app automates absurdist phrases; Off The Bus speaks truth to the polls, launches its new Polling Project; Ask Your Lawmaker Diggifies the public's questions to the candidates; is Karl Rove a better pundit than Markos Moulitsas?; A clip from the Joe Scarborough show is another example of journalists focusing on anything but the issues; VetVoice, a site devoted to veterans' issues in the campaign, launches with a number of candidate posts on the way; analyzing and voting on campaign logos; a new Obama video takes health care head-on; and TechCrunch interviews John Edwards.

I always love it when Google changes their basic logo to commemorate holidays and special days. Thanksgiving has meant a riff on a turkey sitting on a sofa, Edvard Munch's birthday warranted a version of his Scream painting, and so on (check out the archive of special Google logos here).

So naturally I looked for the candidates' take on this webby tradition, but most of them are too serious to acknowledge Halloween at all. Trick, or treat?

Why do more men than women engage with political websites? Are they avoiding doing the dishes?; A new site in support of Ron Paul gets into field organizing; Ann Romney has a new blog; and third-quarter fundraising numbers are starting to come in, and Ron Paul is the big surprise.

Here's an interesting little feature that the Biden campaign has just started using — a tool that can combine several video clips into a single embed, even if they originate on different video hosting sites. Instead of displaying just one clip at a time, a Searchles channel embed creates an array of videos from which people can choose. Most significantly, once the content is embedded in a page, it will automatically update as new videos are added to the channel. This creates a widget-like way to actively push new content out to supporters' sites, which makes a Searchles channel much more than just a video mashup tool. More details and a sample after the break.

A defining problem of our cultural moment: Sometimes, as I stare at my Facebook profile, I have no idea what to write in my “Status Update.” It got me thinking, Do the candidates suffer from the same social-networking ennui as I do? Which presidential candidates update their status on Facebook?

The Web on the Candidates

The growing use of broadband Internet is helping Barack Obama raise more money from more people than ever before, writes the Washington Post's Jose Antonio Vargas. Not only did about a third of Obama's second-quarter earnings of $32.8 million come from online donations, but 90 percent of those donations were under $100, and half were $25 or less. Even MyDD's Jerome Armstrong, a Dean Internet advisor in 2003, calls it "the largest grass-roots campaign in history for this stage of a presidential race." Beyond the appeal of the candidate, part of the reason for the big numbers may come from increased broadband access. African American adults' connection rates have nearly tripled from 14 percent in 2005 to 40 percent this year, according to Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. "Folks online are doing things they've never done before," Rainie says.

The New York Times reports that, in addition to raising money in the form of small donations, Obama's campaign "has also employed novel tactics — like counting sales of $5 speech tickets or $4.50 Obama key chains as individual contributions — to pump up his numbers and transform grass-roots enthusiasm into more useful forms of support." The combination of traditional fundraising and counting paraphernalia sales toward his numbers has combined to give Obama more money ($58.4 million) than any candidate in either party. Another plus: in addition to bringing in more money, merchandise sales add names to the donor rolls.

The Web on the Candidates

Rudy Giuliani isn't using the web smartly enough, and that's why he has the most to fear from it, writes Jeff Jarvis. Because he hasn't produce any videos of his own, Giuliani could be hurt by a new video from New York firefighters who have been sparring with Giuliani, blaming him for bad radios on 9/11 and their inability to fully recover other firefighters' remains, Jarvis says. "Even before this video, if you went to YouTube and searched for the latest videos on Giuliani you’d find no end of Ron Paul videos (because he’s everywhere) and then no end of videos from 9/11 conspiracy theorists and deniers and Giuliani haters. Fringe though they may be, these people own 'Giuliani' on YouTube. Giuliani doesn’t," Jarvis writes. To counteract this effect, Jarvis says Giuliani should "flood-the-zone" -- an idea first made popular by Joe Trippi -- to ensure that Giuliani's positive outnumber the negative. But first, he needs to stop being so afraid of the web. Jarvis reminds us that "this is the same candidate who still has a private MySpace page! He has no Facebook page. His web site doesn’t even have a blog."

Reacting to Joe Biden's recent comments about the blogosphere ("They don't own the Democratic Party. What are they talking about?"), Mike Lux, a co-founder of the new progressive site Open Left, drafted an open letter to him. "It pains me... to see your disdain and, I think, ignorance, about the millions of people who are active in politics through the internet: the members of groups like MoveOn.org, the writers and readers of blogs, the activists who get information and sign petitions and take digital cameras to political events and organize local events through the internet," Lux wrote. "When the folks in this movement speak of taking back our party, we should be clear: we do want to take it back from the inside-the-Beltway elite punditry, and give more ownership to grassroots activists who are the heart and soul of our party. What exactly is wrong with that?" In Biden's defense, he didn't really come out strongly against the blogosphere, but was referring to one blogger, and in the rest of the interview, he doesn't trash bloggers at all and even makes a reference to attending the YearlyKos conference.

The Web on the Candidates

Gaby Wood, in yesterday's Guardian, reviews the details of the "YouTube election" for British readers. Most of the examples -- the "1984" ad, Obama Girl, "I Feel Pretty," and so on -- are familiar to readers of this site, but Wood takes an interesting look at the idea of voter-created campaign ads. "The notion of a 'citizen ad' is an intriguing one, suggesting as it does both a citizen's arrest - the idea of doing something without pay for the public good - and Citizen Kane. You can, from the privacy (and affordability) of your own home, have an effect akin to that of a mogul," Wood writes. "Is YouTube the ultimate form of democracy, then, a means by which voters can have their say and politicians can really listen? Or is it something to be feared, a kind of anarchic 24-hour surveillance?" The answer to this question -- which continues to be asked about the web itself -- isn't as stark as Wood suggests.

An anti-Hillary Clinton Facebook group, "One Million AGAINST Hillary Clinton," now has more supporters than the successful group from which it derives its name, "One Million Strong for Barack." The anti-Clinton group claims an impressive 348,556 members, while the Obama group has a 309,674. When gauging a candidate's popularity on Facebook, how should we factor in this level of unpopularity? Do the negative numbers cancel out the positive numbers? And should we take the group's claim that "whether you are supporting Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, John Edwards or Barack Obama a single goal exists, to ensure that another Clinton is not put into the White House" at face value, or is this a partisan Republican group? (Thanks, Patrick.)