As a nation, the US seems to be more interested in politics than we’ve been in a long time. Voter turnout in last year’s presidential election was 61%, the first time it passed 60% in 40 years. When President Obama was inaugurated in January, Google reported spikes in search activity. Yahoo said that inaugural search trends were the result of “a large, internet-savvy constituency who demand more from the internet than they did four years ago.”

But now that the election and inauguration are distant memories, how do we search today for news about the important decisions being made in Washington, DC? How do we find out what our local representatives are saying and, most importantly, how they’re voting? Traditional media reports on some of what happens in Congress, and of course there’s information on the official web sites of your local representatives. Some lawmakers use Twitter and YouTube to communicate with constituents. But there’s also a new way to search and find out what’s happening in Washington — a new political search engine of sorts called Legistalker.

Just launched in April, Legistalker covers all US legislators, tracking things like their appearances in traditional news, their Twitter feeds, and videos they upload to YouTube. Legistalker says its database is updated every 20 seconds. You can search for a specific legislator, or see all lawmakers for a particular state or zip code. When you reach the profile page of an individual Congressperson, Legistalker adds tabs to see the person’s votes and even a tag cloud showing the most frequently used words in his/her remarks on the Congressional floor.

To make searching easier in the future, you can add any legislator to a “watch list” — and this doesn’t require creating an account or logging in to the site. (It doesn’t even offer accounts/logins, for that matter.)

All in all, Legistalker is a compelling way to search and find out what’s happening in Washington, DC.

Google has been visualizing US primary election data and, in anticipation of the US presidential election, has now created a Google Maps Elections Gallery. There is a wide range of data here, from election results, to Twitter Tweets and search query volumes for each candidate. All the maps can also be embedded.

Today is Super Tuesday, which means that voters in 24 states are carefully reviewing their candidate research and doing last minute thoughtful analysis in preparation for voting in the primaries. Well, maybe that’s hopeful optimism, but in any case, the place these voters are turning to for information is increasingly the internet. Makes sense, as after all, the internet continues to play a larger role in how we get information generally.

And in the case of politics, this turn to digital is in some ways bringing back the roots of American politics — when communities got together and discussed the issues in town halls and parlors. The politicians are more accessible than ever before via their online presence — from web sites to Twitter accounts to YouTube videos. And voters can discuss the issues in real time: live blog the debates, exchange ideas on discussion forums, create Facebook groups. Of course, politics have also made their way into online advertising. Government is also going digital. Georgia, for instance, is providing primary results updates via email.

Search engines are even getting into the political fray. Ask is offering political Smart Answers and Google is displaying primary-related Twitters on a Google map.

Below, the results of a recent study on election-related internet use, as well as a general survey of the online political landscape.

According to a recent PEW Research Center study, 24% of Americans get at least some of their information about the 2008 political campaigns from the internet, compared to just 13% during the 2004 election. 42% of younger voters (those aged 18-29) regularly turn to the internet (particularly social networking sites) for political news. Interestingly, the percentage of Americans who get political news from other mediums such as TV and newspaper have remained fairly flat since 2004, so likely the internet providing an addition source of data rather than replacing traditional sources. Only 15% of those surveyed said that they receive most of their election news online. Television remains the most common sources of news, cited by 71% of respondents.

Where specifically are web searchers going for news?

• msnbc.com (26%)
• cnn.com (23%)
• Yahoo! News (22%)

Google News is used at the same rate as Fox News (9%) and considerably more often than newspaper sites (NY Times was cited 6% of the time; USA Today only 1%).

27% of those under 30 and 37% of those aged 18-24 get at least some political news from social networking sites (this number drops dramatically for those over 30). Interestingly, many survey respondents said they didn’t use the internet to specifically seek out political information; rather, they came across it in the course of doing other things online. This speaks to the growing discovery behaviors of web users evidenced by the popularity of sites such as Digg.

Do most people really get their political information from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report? As it turns out, they generally don’t. Those who watch these types of shows are more likely to consume other types of news as well. However, Americans do see the presidential candidates more often due to television appearances (57%) than due to the debates (43%).

Voters are using the internet for discussion, in addition to learning news. 16% (22% of internet users overall) have sent or received emails about politics. Use of social networking sites is increasing as well, although only 30% of internet users polled said they used social networking sites for any purpose. 12% of those who use social networks have added candidates as a “friend.”

What’s new since 2004 in the online political landscape?

Twitter Google has teamed up with Twitter to generate this super cool Google Map that shows real-time Twitters about the primaries. @SuperTuesday is providing real-time coverage throughout the day. Terraminds is useful to see what people are saying about the process or specific candidates, such as this search for Obama or this search for super tuesday. Some journalists are even using Twitter as a kind of reporting tool.

Social Networking Sites, Such As Facebook All types of groups exist, from news groups like this one from ABC news, to organizations like Rock the Vote. A search for Hillary Clinton Facebook groups skews towards anti-Hillary gatherings, although supportive groups are scattered throughout the results as well, which brings up the question of consolidation. While more and more of us are turning to the internet for news and discussion, more of us are also starting web pages, groups, forums, and Twitter accounts for topics, and it can be difficult to sort through it all. Some social networking sites have tried to make clearing through the clutter with focused landing pages, such as this one from Pageflakes.

Nielson has been tracking blogging chatter and top sites. Democrats seem to favor blackamericaweb.com and dailykos.com, Republicans favor rushlimbaugh.com and newsmax.com, and independents are visiting boston.com and bostonherald.com.

Old and new media are coming together with partnerships like CNN/YouTube, MTV/MySpace, and CBS/Digg.

Online Videos The PEW study notes that 41% of those under 30 (and 24% of all Americans) have watched campaign videos online. Services like Truveo are providing tools to easily access political videos online and viral videos are coming into play in the campaigns, probably for the first time (such as this one for Barack Obam, seen 1,357,756 times at the time of this writing). Google is getting in on the video action as well, creating a central location for political videos at YouChoose08. They’re placing videos from across the country on a Google Map to more easily put the videos in a geographical context.

Online Trends You can do lots of fun things with applications like Google Trends and Alexa. Google Trends says Obama might be leading slightly over Clinton:

But Alexa thinks Obama has a clear lead:

As does Compete:

Are the candidates well-versed in search engine optimization? Barack Obama has the number one listing for his name (after the book and news results, but above the Wikipedia listing!), but his home page is entirely in Flash. Hillary Clinton also has the first result (after the news listing) and her home page has some content, although if you turn off images and javascript, her navigation disappears completely.

I found most candidate web sites when searching for their names, but they don’t fare as well in topic-specific searches. And candidates might be disheartened to learn that surfers are accessing news satire sites like theonion.com and thedailyshow.com just as often as candidate sites (11% of internet users for each site type).

Search Marketing Gurus has an entire series that breaks down how each candidate is using the internet that includes SEO critique of their web sites. The post on John Edwards, for instance, notes that he was the first candidate to use the internet (YouTube) to announce his presidency, and was active online in places like YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr, and blogging. However, his official site wasn’t optimized for search, he had no PPC campaign, and his team neglected many social networking sites that they initially created profiles for.

What about politicians and online advertising? A report by Borrell & Associates found that online spending will garner just $20 million of the nearly $5 billion political advertising budget. But ad networks aren’t ignoring what’s bound to become a larger wave. Google AdWords announced new policies for political ads, for instance.

How Well Does The Internet Answer Political Questions? A previous PEW/Internet study found that most Americans (70% of those surveyed) expect the government to make information available online. Resource Shelf has a list of online resources, mostly government powered, that provide election-related data. LLRX.com has a roundup of state and federal election resources as well.

But does search satisfactorily answer election-related questions? Not always. This is an opportunity that marketers (those working for candidates, political organizations, and other related businesses) can take better advantage of throughout the election season.

I noted on my blog that I only found the answer to the question “when are the primaries for each state?” at result #13. In that post, I talked about how marketers could take a look at questions that had no good answers ranking on the first page of results and create valuable, unique content for those questions in order to get more search traffic. Case in point, I wrote that post, which contained the answer to the question, on February 3rd. Today, two days later, my blog post ranks #1 for the query.

I tried a few other queries to see how sites are stacking up. I purposely didn’t add keywords that I assume would help me get more accurate results (such as “2008″) since most regular searchers wouldn’t add them either.

“Which candidates support tax cuts?”
youdecide08.foxnews.com ranks first with a story about Republican candidates talking about tax cuts. No candidate sites rank on the first page. If I were running a marketing campaign for a candidate that was pushing for tax cuts, I’d make sure to have a page on the site devoted to this.

“Which candidates support gay rights ?”
Once again, no candidate sites rank in the top 10, and the third result is about the 2004 elections (for cyclical events, make sure to update your content for the next event!). I didn’t click through to any results, but I thought that democraticunderground.com (position #5) did a good job in the title and description of providing text that made me think it was the result that would best answer my question.

I asked several other questions (about environmental issues, the war in Iraq, the economy) and official candidate sites weren’t returned on the first page for any of them. Candidate sites could be well served by a page that talks about the details of each major issue and how the candidate leans. Notably, sites like Yahoo! Answers and discussion forums were returned in the top 10 a lot for these types of queries, so candidates, political groups, and other interested groups could get more visibility by being active on these types of sites.

Overall, there’s a lot of opportunity for smart marketers and candidates and clearly, internet usage for political information will only increase as time goes on. It’s likely that by the 2012 election, more than half of Americans will use the internet as their primary information source and candidates will use social networking tools and online media just as often as they do personal and television appearances. Maybe we’ll even be voting online by then. I won’t hold my breath for that last one.

The US Geological Survey and Google are now making global earthquake data available in Google Earth as one of the layers under “Places of Interest.”

According to the USGS:

USGS and Google signed an agreement to publish historic earthquake data from the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS) catalog as a “built-in” layer, accessible directly from the Google Earth viewer . . . The new layer includes historic earthquakes since 1900, and USGS real-time earthquakes are now accessible as a hyperlink from within Google Earth. If the layer is checked, users will see a sprinkling of dots across the globe, each marking an earthquake epicenter.

To display the earthquake locations in the Google Earth viewer, go to the layers menu, and look in the folder “Places of Interest.” Open the “Geographic Features” folder, and click on “Earthquakes.”

Google has been plotting election results from the US presidential primaries on maps. Those maps have included candidate and news videos. But now for “Super Tuesday” (February 5), Google is doing something somewhat more ambitious over at YouTube — call it “Super Tubesday.”

The site will offer geotagged political videos from candidates, users, and various news outlets. The Google LatLong Blog explains: Anyone — from candidates and voters to members of media — can upload videos to YouTube and geotag them so they can be tracked and viewed on a Google Map that resides in the Super Tuesday channel. There will be unique markers for voters, Democratic campaigns, Republican campaigns, and news outlets so that viewers can easily determine the source of the video. The site will feature a wide range of content, from predictions and interviews to personal reflections.

Super Tuesday may determine each party’s candidate because the number of convention delegates being awarded is so large. It’s a very important day in US politics, and hopefully everyone will go out and vote for their candidate of choice.

AOL’s video search engine Truveo has created a new election videos site/area that collects candidate videos as well as commentary and news footage. Truveo claims the site is more comprehensive in terms of its sources and range of content than others. YouTube offers YouChoose, featuring candidate and user-generated videos, and Yahoo News has election-related video. MSN video offers election coverage as well.

The Library of Congress has teamed up with Flickr to create The Commons. The Library of Congress has added a sample of their over one million photos to Flickr, so that the Flickr community can help describe the photos through tagging.

My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven from the Library of Congress Blog writes that the goal of this partnership is to help “better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.” They have selected about 1,500 photos each from two of their more popular collections and posted them on Flickr for this purpose.

Many hands make light work from the Flickr Blog asks us to do our part by tagging as many of the photos as possible. How do you do that? If you are viewing an image on Flickr, on the right hand column, there is a section called “Tags.” If you are logged into Flickr, you will be able to add your own tags to those photos. Tags are a way of describing the image, which will ultimately help users search for those pictures and give the Library of Congress a more complete and comprehensive method of organizing those photos.

Google has been showcasing its primaries mapplets, which offer results breakdowns by candidate and county, as well as other information (e.g., video). The Google LatLong blog now posts about how the candidates, campaign staffers, and other third parties are using the Google Maps and Maps API to showcase their messages and organize political volunteers and activists in upcoming primaries throughout the country.

Yahoo’s “political dashboard” also offers a range of interesting polling and demographic data about the candidates, their support, and the various primaries.

A PEW/Internet and American Life study out today finds that the place Americans turn to most for answers is the internet. The study, which surveyed 2,796 Americans, found that 76% have internet access and that 58% turn to the internet when they have questions about things like health, school, careers, and government issues. The project focused on how people use the internet, libraries, and government resources when they need to solve problems and found that those without high-speed internet access (no access or dial-up only) were less satisfied with their ability to get the answers they were seeking.

Overall, people tend to consult two to three sources for information and are generally satisfied with the results. 77% of internet users (55% of Americans) have high-speed access; whereas 18% are still on dial-up. The speed of access seems to make a big difference in whether a searcher turns to the internet or some other source for answers. Those with broadband access spend more time online and are happier with their online experiences. 77% of those with broadband access at home used the internet for answers, compared to 57% of those with dial-up access.

Below, more findings on internet usage, particularly in researching health and government-related issues.

The study had some interesting finding about internet usage in general, particularly regarding demographics. Of those surveyed, 76% use the internet. Of those internet users:

• 59% go online at least once a day from home
• 43% go online at least once a day from work
• 77% have high-speed access

The study also found that “Gen Y” (those 18-30) are the most likely to turn to the library, although in many cases, they are using the library for its free internet resources. 65% of those overall who turned to the library for help said they did so for internet usage (vs. 58% who said they went for access to reference books). Gen Y are also the group most likely to turn to the internet for answers: 76% of them, vs. 35% of those 62 to 73.

Not unexpectedly, younger, wealthier, and more educated Americans are the groups most likely to have internet access. In the 18-30 group, 91% have access, vs. 29% over those over 71. 91% of those in households earning over $40,000 have access; whereas only 61% of those earning under $40,000 do. 93% of those with college degrees have access, compared to 41% of those without a high school diploma. The study found that age is the strongest predictor of access, followed by income and education. No other demographic signals seemed to have influence.

The Search For Medical Answers The study looked at several types of issues, including health. It’s one of the topics that online Americans turn to the internet for most, but also area in which searchers are most concerned about accuracy and privacy. A previous PEW Internet and American Life report found that those with medical problems are particularly likely to go online to get answers. 80% of online Americans have turned to the internet for medical answers and most start with a general search engine, rather than a medical vertical. Jupiter Research reached similar conclusions, finding that 71% of online consumers use search engines to find health-related information. (Although only 46% of those with health issues use the internet to get answers, vs. 83% who seek out a medical professional.)

Medical verticals have been around for a long time (for instance, WebMD), but as more people go online and turn to the internet as source of information, more sites are looking to be the online health resource.

Most searchers start at a major search engine, so it makes sense that they would start providing dedicated health resources. We’ve been hearing about Google Health for a long time, which Marissa Mayer has mentioned may launch in early 2008. So far though, Google has only used Google Co-op to provide OneBox-style refinements to the top of health-related search results.

Microsoft recently launched HealthVault, which enables people to store medical records, as well as search through vetted, frequently refreshed resources.

Search engines aren’t the only ones jumping in the health information business. CureHunter, for instance, says its advantage over search engines is that instead of giving searchers “endless piles of links,” it provides “quantified answers” and a “machine second opinion.” Revolution Health, started by AOL founded Steve Case (who was previously involved in another health-related project: lime.com), provides medical history management. iMedix is attempting to combine health research with social networking, which is a tricky proposition. There are obvious advantages to sharing health-related information and stories, but fears around privacy could keep people from participating. Overall though, only 19% of those with internet access expressed privacy concerns with researching information online (this number would likely be higher for health-specific information).

Researching Government Resources When people are researching government issues, 66% said they prefer to use the internet. As with health topics, most searchers seem to start with a major search engine rather than a specific government web site. 65% of those who approached the government for help said they were very successful, and while that’s the majority, there’s also a lot of room for improvement. Google in particular has been vocal about working with government agencies to make more information available through its search results.

Most of those surveyed expressed a preference for having government information available online (70% said they expected the government to make information available on the web), although many would also like access to printed materials as well as actual people (by phone and in person) to answer questions. 58% of those surveyed had contacted a government agency within the last year, most often in person. Interestingly, while survey respondents favored the internet for most government-related research, such as for information about benefits or government programs, only 35% said they’d use the internet to find government-powered community information such as about crime, education, or traffic.

Using Libraries One goal of the study was to discover how libraries could better serve the 1/3 of the population without high-speed internet access. Only 13% of those surveyed said they used the public library as a resource for finding information (vs. 16% for television and radio and 36% for newspapers and magazines). However, 53% of respondents said they had visited a library within the last 12 months. The demographic signals that influence internet use (age, income, and education) seem to be a factor in library use as well, with income having the reverse impact on library use from internet use. 17% of those with incomes below $40,000 have sought the library for research vs 9% for those with incomes above this level. (This could because the youngest demographic is most likely to use libraries for problem solving.) Another factor in library visitation is children. 63% of those with children at home visit libraries vs. 48% of those without. Convenience also plays a part. 58% of those with a library nearby has visited it; whereas only 42% of those with no library within 2 miles have.

Library users were most likely to seek answers to school-related issues (20%), followed by career issues (11%). 68% of those who visit libraries use the computers there, and 62% use those computers to access the internet. 69% of library visitors also received help from library staff.

What Helped People The Most? The majority of people said that they were very satisfied with results they received from government agencies (65%), libraries (64%), and the internet (63%). These three resources beat out even the help of experts (61%). The internet provided the most information (although more is not always better, of course). Those with little or no internet access were the least likely to report successful resolution to their questions (54% vs. 63% with high access).

In summary, those with internet access are increasingly using it to seek answers and are generally happy with the information they receive. Since searchers still tend to start with major search engines, the push to include more blended search results, as well as provide help for specialized searches, should continue to improve satisfaction. Libraries can also play a role in making the internet available to more Americans, but have a tough road ahead in making those with little or no access aware of the resources available there.

According to the South Florida Business Journal, Florida will be working with Google “to create new search engine features for those looking for government services online.” Google will be indexing Florida state databases that are currently not discoverable via the Internet. Other states with similar programs include California, Arizona, Michigan, Utah, and Virginia. Google also offers US government search.