The important new role of blogs in analyzing and predicting election results is clear, according to two experts whose Web site has been monitored by many presidential candidates’ campaigns this year. They say changes in the amount of blog coverage given to a candidate have been a major indicator of whether votes were swinging toward that candidate and who would ultimately win. They are already predicting a winner based on their observations.

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Barack Obama looks at this point in time to be heading for the White House as the next president of the United States, at least this is what our sources indicate. It is a bold statement, but we believe that the voice of the many is a good indicator when assumptions are to be made about the fall out of an election.

Since January of this year when we started our tracking project on the US election, Barack Obama has received more attention in the blogosphere than any of the other candidates. Hilary Clinton was ahead until mid February, since then Obama has been the most mentioned candidate.

The same relationship between Obama, Clinton and Mccain is also found in traditional news media online: Clinton dropped significantly once the primaries gave Obama the number of delegates needed to become the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. Since then, Obama and Mccain follows a similar pattern, the only difference being that Obama is getting more attention than Mccain measured against the total number of times each of them are referred to online.

(Click on the images to enlarge)

Peter Mandelson, the UK Commissioner for Trade, is more popular than his EU colleagues amongst bloggers. The sometimes controversial Mandelson is EU Commissioner for Trade since November 2004. Interestingly enough his second most discussed colleague is the Commissioner for Competition Neelie Smit with whom he had some dealings after it had been revealed that Mandelson spent some time with Microsofts Paul Allen when Microsoft was under investigation.

On YouTube Mandelson has strong visibility competition for Commissioner from Media and Information Society, the Luxembourgish Viviane Redding, still Mandelson has higher visibility than the Commission President Barroso. (click images to enlarge)

In view of the 4th of November election in the US, Buzztrend launches the BT Blogometer. The meter to be regularly updated, will indicate the blog visibility of the two cadidates Barack Obama and John MCain.

The blogometer will be presented without comment or analysis and will basically inform you about the current status in the blog visibility of the candidates.

Our first blogometer is presented in the next graph (click to enlarge).

As we have seen in our coverage of other elections (reported on in other articles on this site), there is a strong correlation between our measurements of social media and the traditional opnion pollers and effective results of elections.

For the race for the US democratic presidency candidature we have analysed Buzztrend results against the benchmark of Gallup. We have used the data from Gallup extensive coverage of the race and recalculated both data sets to the relative measurements (between Clinton and Barack).

The graphs (click to enlarge) below show the result of that analysis:

"Social media is having a significant impact on these campaigns with not only how they are getting the word out to their supporters, but how they are perceived by the Democratic party." writes Liana Evans on SearchEngineWatch.com.