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For the Republicans, Ron Paul was streets ahead, with more than 46,000 channel subscribers on YouTube and almost 20,000 "friends" on Digg.com (www.digg.com/elections), where users cast their online vote for the candidate of their choice. Paul's online success lies in his campaign being more Web 2.0 than any of the others, according to election watchers. "He has recognised that his supporters know more about what to do online than he or his campaign and he has encouraged them to build a campaign for him," says Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of TechPresident.com. Massie Ritsch, communications director at the Center for Responsive Politics, an organisation monitoring campaign finance, agrees: "Paul's fundraising has been staggering considering his low performance in the primaries. As far as we know, he was the top Republican fundraiser in the last three months of 2007."

It wasn't only Paul who benefited from an explosion in online support. Obama arrived in the Presidential primaries without the kind of political juggernaut accompanying Hillary Clinton. According to Brooks Jackson - who, before working for the US political watchdog FactCheck.org, worked for Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal and CNN - Obama "owes a good deal of his current success to the fact that the internet allows like-minded people to find each other and to come together across large distances more easily than ever".

At the time of writing, Obama was ahead of the other Democrat candidates in every metric that TechPresident.com uses, except

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blog mentions on Technorati. His grassroots campaign is among the most effective of all the candidates and, with Obama pushing Clinton to the wire, it's impossible to argue that his online support doesn't translate into real voters.

YouTube bias?

Nowhere has Obama's online campaign gathered more momentum than on YouTube. At the YouChoose '08 site, viewers are presented with each of the 16 original candidates and can watch videos submitted by each campaign. Viewers can sort the videos by candidate, or issue, or by watching a pair of joint YouTube and CNN debates in which the questions were submitted on video by YouTube users.

The results have been incredible. In less than 24 hours, Obama's rebuttal of President Bush's final State of the Union address had been watched more than 330,000 times, catapulting it to the top of YouTube's daily chart. The message is getting out to a massive audience: if Google took an interest in a particular candidate, its influence would be huge.

Not that there's any hint of YouTube deliberately promoting one candidate over another. A Google spokesperson told us emphatically that the company doesn't make contributions or donations to political parties or candidates and it isn't backing any political party. According to the spokesperson, Google's mission is "to organise the world's information and to make it universally accessible... we're not creating any of the content".

Even so, not all candidates fare equally well on YouTube. The failings are sometimes stylistic. Democrat candidate Mike Gravel's videos are often sub-student productions, complete with dodgy white balance, deafening background noise and bad lighting. By contrast, Hillary Clinton's videos are professionally produced, and she's often carefully placed among furniture that could have fallen straight from the set of The West Wing. She looks Presidential. The two impressions are worlds apart - without the lighting and make-up of a professional TV studio, Gravel simply looks like an opinionated 77-year-old man, not someone who might realistically become the next Commander-in-Chief.