Media coverage: the internet enables us to gather the entire corpus of news and check whether it is in sync with the world it covers. Last spring, I counted mentions of the candidates in major media and saw Obama getting disproportionate attention. Was that news judgment or an agenda? Today, we can track media mentions via Google Trends and Daylife (a startup I advise), where I see Clinton generally ahead.
Searches: Google Trends lets us snoop on the number of searches on words. Clinton was ahead, but since Obama's victory in Iowa, he took the lead. Is that an indicator of support or merely curiosity?
YouTube: Video traffic is a similarly skewed but still informative measure of supporters' rabidity. The small but passionate band behind libertarian candidate Ron Paul in the Republican race has played YouTube brilliantly, making him No 1 with 10.5m views v 9.5m for Obama and 4.6m for Clinton.
clipped from: www.guardian.co.uk