Due to the breakneck recycle speed of the political news cycle, trying to stay informed on what’s happening in the world of politics can be nauseating. You’re probably always going to be me missing something somewhere. However aggregating your own collection of news sources doesn’t have to be so stupefying since Google has made it a little easier for voters and otherwise interested parties to attempt to stay abreast of the latest news concerning topics, candidates, and election results. Google Politics & Elections, a new wing of the Google News service, collects articles covering breaking stories related to politics in the United States. With the service, readers can isolate topics to certain candidates (right now it’s a bunch of Republican primary candidates and the current POTUS, Barack Obama) as well as issues related to categories like the economy, social issues, and healthcare. From the post on Google’s official blog:

The site enables voters, journalists and campaigns to quickly sort through election info by popularity, race or issues. People can also check out the Trends Dashboard to take the web’s real-time political pulse by comparing candidates’ YouTube video views, search traffic and Google News mentions. Campaign staffers, advocates and everyday citizens can utilize our tools and features to reach, engage and inspire voters.

What might be most interesting for anyone who makes a hobby out of political speculation there is a function on the Politics & Elections homepage where you can track trends related to each specific candidate. For instance, given the latest surge of Rick Santorum out of the bowels of obscurity and into a legitimate third place (the fact that third place is now a consummation devoutly to be wished is kind of absurd, really), readers can actually see the rise in Google News Mentions of Santorum in the past week. It’s a fun tool as an observer, but given how tumultuous this primary cycle has been for all Republican candidates I wouldn’t recommend placing any bets on the reliability of any search trends as proof of sustainable electability.

The Google Politics & Elections also employs the Hangouts tools for journalists who are personally covering the election, perhaps as an effort to promote sodality and collaboration but I anticipate it will most likely be used as an online watering hole where everybody commiserates and decompresses. You can add the Politics & Elections tool to your Google+ account, as well, if you’re interested in participating or watching any of the activity in the Hangouts. Additionally, you can follow news stories as they develop by adding this group to your Circles. The news service will also cover international politics as well as the home-grown brews but given that we are officially in the election year, expect most of the news to be dominated by the election of the next POTUS.

Since today kicks off the election of the Republican primaries with the Iowa caucus, following these services might be a good idea if any of you are hoping to stay informed as the results start to come in about which candidate will claim victory in Iowa this evening.

The congressman has, for better or worse, regularly been identified as an agent of financial reform and was co-author of the Dodd-Frank Act, a bill that sought to provide greater consumer protection as well implement financial regulations in order to any prevent future economic turmoil.

In addition from Frank’s legacy to reform financial practices in the United States, he will also be remembered as one of the first and most visible gay figures to have been involved in congressional politics.

Across the Twitterscape, first reactions ranged from adulation and lament:

to irreverence and outright relief:

One amusing piece of trivia that’s been making the retweeting rounds on Twitter is the singular post from an account alleged to belong to Rep. Frank (the account is not verified, so its verity is debatable):

Should that first and final tweet ever be validated, our congressional model of Oscar Wilde has taken his final bow from the absurd theater of politics.

The government officially shut down last night at midnight after a week of hard-fought negotiations. Republicans and Democrats have been in disagreement for months about the budget – specifically how to close the $5 billion budget deficit.

According to the Washington Post, the state battle mirrored the budget battle on the national front – Republicans putting the emphasis on cutting spending on certain programs and Democrats attempting to raise the taxes on the wealthiest 2% of Minnesotans.

This isn’t the first government shutdown in recent memory. In 2005, the government shutdown under then Governor Tim Pawlenty. That one lasted 8 days and resulted in the temporary layoff of about 9,000 workers. Pawlenty is now a candidate for President.

During this government shutdown, only necessary government functions will remain up and running. This includes public safety like the police and fire departments, welfare programs, state facilities like prisons, and IT management of governmental systems.

Like I noted earlier, the state parks will be closed this weekend. This is estimated to cost the state $12 million in revenue for each week the government remains shutdown.

The state government was close to a deal, but Democratic Governor Mark Dayton could not approve the GOP’s cuts to the health and human services department. Earlier in the negotiations the Republicans proposed a budget that included some layoffs for state workers and teachers. It also included some non-budgetary items such as a vote ID bill and abortion restrictions. The Democrats refused that proposal.

So, with the two parties in a deadlock, the government is now shutdown. Twitter is reacting strongly to the news, with opinions coming from all sides of the political spectrum. Here are a series of tweets blaming the GOP for the shutdown –

Some on Twitter point to Democratic ideals as the cause of Minnesota’s budget problem –

Many have just decided to take a crack at the state of Minnesota –

Conveniently the same top 3 candidates in both parties are both considered the top 3 candidates, so I’m going to stick with the same in my new analysis (Democrats: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards.

Republicans: Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and John McCain). In my previous post I looked at a few points that haven’t changed, like age of domain and the choice of domain URL, so refer to that post for that analysis.

This analysis looks at basic SEO metrics and compares data from January 2008 to March 2007. A few new measurements are given following these, including PPC branding and a new metric called IndexRank. And for fun we’ll come up with the winners from both parties in terms of their effectiveness in SEO.

Backlinks

Backlinks, or inbound links, are how many sites link to your site.

These figures are from Yahoo.

Barack Obama leads in backlinks by about 150,000 backlinks. John Edwards started with having almost 6 times less than Hillary and beats her by 80,000 backlinks.

In the Republican field, John McCain started off with very few (comparatively) backlinks and still ends with 100,000 less than Mitt Romney. Romney leads Rudy by about 50,000 links.

Technorati Links

This is used as a measure of popularity in the blogosphere world. The more the better.

Obama again leads on Technorati links and John Edwards and Clinton keep their same position, with Hillary having the most percentage increase.
Mitt Romney started well ahead of both Rudy and John (2.5 X more and 5 X more respectively) and still leads in Technorati links. Rudy surpasses John McCain with a larger increase in links.

Alexa Rank

I know Alexa isn’t perfect, but it’s an interesting comparison. The lower the number, “the better”. The number represents the rank of the website out of the top websites on the Internet in terms of traffic. The most visited site on the Internet is ranked 1. A zero (0) means either an error or not enough traffic to rank.

All of the Democratic candidates have seen a drop in their Alexa Rank since March 2007, with John Edwards taking the worst drop. Barack Obama leads with the best rank.

All of the Republican candidates see a better Alexa ranking, although anything was better than Rudy’s rank in March 2007. Mitt Romney leads with the best rank.

Page Strength

All candidates made significant strides, as would be expected. PageStrength is not a measurement of how good the pages are, but of how well-known, cited, visited, and linked to a site is.

John Edwards has the highest PageStrength while Barack jumped the most, moving from third to second.
John McCain made the most stride but also started as the lowest in PageStrength. Both McCain and Romney end up with the same PageStrength, both beating out Hillary’s PageStrength.

Indexed Pages

Google and Yahoo both give a different number of pages in their index, so I’ll show both, Google/Yahoo.

These numbers are all over the place, it’s hard to say who reports more accurately (Google vs. Yahoo). However, there’s no doubt that Obama has created tons of content (probably a lot of user-generated content).

PPC Branding

I’m not going to recap the PPC from March 2007 because the keywords I looked at were only used by 2 of the candidates. This time I chose to look at the use of PPC for their own name, which I feel is a reflection of their PPC campaign. If you’re not running ads for your brand (your name) you’re probably not running much of a PPC campaign.

Barack Obama – Ads by Obama and Rudy
Hillary Clinton – Ad by Rudy
John Edwards – Ad by Rudy
Rudy Giuliani – Ad by Rudy
Mitt Romney – Ads by Rudy and Mike Huckabee
John McCain – Ads by McCain and Rudy

Rudy clearly comes out a winner, but keep in mind this is only a snapshot. If you follow these links at different times of day and different geographical locations you may see very different results. These are coming from the West Coast.

IndexRank – a measurement of content freshness

This metric is from 0-10 where 10 is the highest. The higher the number the better the content growth, freshness, and the more indexed the site is by Google.

Hillary Clinton – 8
Barack Obama – 8
John Edwards – 5
Mitt Romney – 9
John McCain – 8
Rudy Giuliani – 6

Mitt Romney wins out with a 9 above even the Democrats. Hillary and Obama are both at 8 and John Edwards lags way behind the whole group with a 5. Rudy lags behind the Republican candidates with a 6.

The Winners

Back in March 2007 there was no clear SEO winner in either party. After 10 months of campaigning, you can really see a lot of changes in all the candidates, some more than others.

In the Democratic party, Barack Obama clearly trumps both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in the growth of their site and the pursuit in SEO.

In the Republican party, its not as clear but Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani both have made great strides, but I think Mitt Romney’s advantage in traffic, IndexRank, and Technorati links gives him an edge over Giuliani.

Comments

When it comes to the type of political videos watched, 27 percent have viewed a news story about a campaign or candidate online, while 14 percent have watched a candidate interview and the same number a political speech. Only 11 percent watched a political advertisement and 10 percent a campaign video.

Breaking it down by party, Democrats are more likely than Republicans or Independents (40% versus 35% and 33%) to have watched a political video online. Democrats are more likely to have watched each of the types of political videos than Republicans.

More than half (56%) who have watched a political video say they did so to help decide which candidates to support, 50 percent have watched videos for candidates they already support and 35 percent have watched videos for candidates they knew they would not support. Democrats are more likely then Republicans to watch videos to help them decide who to support (59% versus 46%). Republicans are more likely to watch videos for candidates they knew they would not support (39% versus 31%).

Just 7 percent say they would watch a lot more of political speeches if more were available on the Internet, while 17 percent say they would watch a little more. Thirty-six percent would not watch more political speeches if more were available online. Even fewer would watch campaign ads if there were more online. Forty-one percent would not watch anymore while four percent would watch a lot more campaign ads and 10 percent a little more.

The poll concludes, "While YouTube may be taking over the Internet, it looks like campaign themed videos may not yet be ‘must see’ viewing. Campaigns probably don’t want to avoid going online, but they should ensure that they do not focus online on this medium – as a struggling campaign with insufficient funds may be wont to do."
 

The Blue Hampshire blog traced two usernames to the Clinton campaign, along with four usernames that had registered with the blog within minutes of one another that were recommending a pro- Clinton post, according to Dean Barker, managing editor of the blog.

"Paid campaign staff are welcome in this community, but are asked to disclose their affiliation to a campaign, either through their signature line, a disclosure statement on a diary, or even in the choosing of a username," Barker wrote on the blog.

"The fact that all the users mentioned above came from a Clinton campaign IP, but did not register with campaign email addresses, and avoided making comments or diaries, instead only recommending pro-Clinton diaries, strikes us as gaming the system and a form of "recommend astroturf."

The Clinton campaign told Blue Htampshire that the comments on the blog were not part of an orchestrated effort, but the "product of over-eager staffers and volunteers, done without her awareness, and will not be repeated."

"While initial acts like these are very small, when a community starts to sense there is no enforcement of the norms of the site, a slow slide into anarchy inevitably begins," Barker wrote.

"Team Clinton is the subject of this post, but it is meant to be a warning shot across the bow of all campaigns. And further, it is the fact that we do manage to have civilized discussions here among opponents that makes this line worth drawing." 
 

Though John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, and Joe Biden all saw traffic to their websites increase by double-digit percentages (30, 53, and 60 respectively), their overall numbers are still dwarfed by the two frontrunners.

While Obama has an even split of male and female visitors, Clinton’s visitors skew female at 56 percent. The largest percentage (26 percent) of Obama’s visitors are under 25 years old.

If measured by the number of states that have more heavily visited the frontrunners’ websites, Obama leads there too, with 29 out of the contiguous states, compare to 19 for Clinton.

Pace’s findings contradict what a recent analysis of Google Trends revealed.  They should, however, stack up well against David Utter’s article on the Republican field (since both used Compete statistics).

According to Compete, then, the campaign website with the most traffic belongs to Barack Obama; Obama’s site received 318,179 unique visitors in November.  Hillary Clinton’s website was the closest runner-up, but it got just 289,615 visitors.

Things looked even more dismal for John Edwards, whose site received only 136,002 unique visitors.  Pace got into the geographic distribution of visits, though, and wrote, “Edwards’ focus on Iowa, where polling shows him very competitive, is evident as he appears to be drawing a considerable following in Iowa to rival Obama and Clinton.”

Kucinich, Biden, Richardson, Dodd, and Gravel all trailed the top three candidates, and did so in that order.  Still, with the better part of a year left to go before the election, there’s plenty of time for any person to shake (or muck) things up.

We have fun playing with Compete and its ability to present snapshots of web traffic data that can be compared with each other. Since Doug Caverly looked at Democrats and Google Trends, I thought I’d check out the elephant side of the political circus.

The web traffic for Giuliani, Thompson, and Romney doesn’t look very exciting. Each of the trio tops 108,000 visitors by a small margin for November 2007. Thompson enjoyed a spike upon announcing his candidacy, but has since settled into the pack of web interest.

One might guess John McCain’s traffic would reflect a dropoff in interest as he has suffered from woeful fundraising and the need to make some cutbacks in his campaigning. One would guess correctly, as his visits in November hovered around 92,000.

Add up the monthly traffic for that foursome, and about 420,000 people have expressed interest in their campaigns. Then we have some fun and toss Ron Paul into the mix.

Paul’s site drew over 496,000 in November. His site traffic began to rise from June through September. After that, I’m surprised a Game Over sign didn’t light up on the other candidates’ sites, as about 350,000 visitors arrived at Paul’s site in October, on the way to November’s figure.

How that translates to the real world won’t even be hinted at until the primary season begins in 2008. The Republican machine could be astonished if Paul’s web interest converts into votes, but considering how McCain once challenged George W. Bush before being knocked back, Paul’s campaign may end up being noteworthy for its dynamic online activity.

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The top three political websites sending visitors to YouTube were left-leaning Daily Kos, What Really Happened, and Democratic Underground, according to Hitwise’s Heather Hopkins, perhaps to watch President Bush flipping the bird on television.

But also, Democrat websites control traffic from YouTube, as visitors are directed most to JibJab, but then to Daily Kos and John Kerry.com.

Compared to the first week of October, YouTube generated 63 percent more US traffic for political Websites in the first week of November. That spike is lifting user-generated content to a par alongside blogs, email, and search.

“This data shows how consumer generated media is growing in significance to several aspects of Internet use, from photo sharing and communication and now to political websites in advance of the mid-term elections,” said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise.

“As we look to the future, consumer generated media and the participatory nature of sites like YouTube will be along side search and email as important marketing vehicles when it comes to political campaigns.”

Not that that fervor stretches all the way to Election Day. Just last week, half of the top ten linked-to viral videos were connected with US politics, Antony Mayfield reports. As of today, the Web-video viewing public has gone back watching two different versions of an animated gummy bear dance.

It’s not just blogs, activist websites and popular video sites, it’s a search game, too. Google alone sent nearly 19 percent of traffic to political sites, with search engines overall sending just over 28 percent.

The Democrat-planted Google bombs have been widely covered since the “miserable failure” search war in 2004. That was continued this election season as well with MyDD organizing a massive offensive against Republican candidates that included AdWords advertisements.

A search for George Allen brings a sponsored link to a YouTube video of the “macaca” incident. Search for Conrad Burns and you’ll be greeted with “Defeat Burns” and “Burns Earns and F.” Mike Dewine got the same grade.

While this year’s top political keywords have gone relatively unchanged since 2004, the Democrats have taken full advantage of buzzy keywords to drive home their damning points.

Click for Full Size Image

As also revealed by Hitwise, seven of the top ten keywords leading to liberal websites involve some variation of a Mark Foley. The rest involve other Republican scandals, like the controversy around country music singer Sarah Evans’ political husband and the naked pictures that surfaced of him.

Keywords leading to conservative websites are fairly standard vanilla – even self-centered perhaps – three variations of “republican,” the top is “gop,” and the rest seemed mostly concerned about illegal immigration, Katie Couric ratings, and how a death row inmate cheated the system by committing suicide.

Democrats are taking full advantage of the negative buzz , utilizing the greatest communication vehicle since the printing press, while Republicans seem barely aware of what, exactly, is traversing that series of tubes.

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