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"As goes the saying, only about half of Americans of voting age for the election of congressional representatives and the two heads of the executive branch actually make their way to ballot boxes ever 2-4 years. Now, however, it seems nearly the same percentage of citizens are requesting information of the 2008 presidential campaign by way of the Web, setting a new record for interest in national politics online.\nAs summarized in a report released today by the Pew Internet &amp; American Life Project, a recent poll reveals an estimated \u201C46% of all Americans have used the Internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilize others.\u201D\nThe basic construction of the Pew poll reads like so:\n\n40% of all Americans (internet users and non-users alike) have gotten news and information about this year\u2019s campaign via the internet.\n19% of Americans go online once a week or more to do something related to the campaign, and 6% go online to engage politically on a daily basis.\n23% of Americans say they receive emails urging them to support a candidate or discuss the campaign once a week or more.\n10% of Americans use email to contribute to the political debate with a similar frequency.\n4% of Americans have exchanged political views via text messaging.\n\nJuxtaposed against statistics gleaned through polling four years prior, Pew Internet states: \u201CThe proportion of Americans going online on a typical day at the tail end of the primary season to get political news or information has more than doubled since a comparable point in the 2004 race - from 8% of all adults in spring 2004 to 17% of all adults in spring 2008.\u201D\n(The latest survey is based on a sampling of 2,251 adults taken between April 8 and May 11. Pew claims a window of error of 2%.)\nOf course, myriad polls are sometimes inaccurate in their portrayal of facts or regional or national intentions, but while predictions of popular political decisions to be made in the foreseeable future are at times hugely unreliable, this measure has been taken with some hindsight, so it is perhaps a solid series of numbers to base analysis on.\nWhat can one make of this reading of an Internet trend? Well, there are certainly multiple factors working in the favor of the number 46. Web video consumption has risen dramatically in the last 12-24 months, as has social network usage. That goes for political involvement on sites like Facebook as well as the My.BarackObama.com network run by the Obama '08 campaign, among numerous other forums.\nAlso, while the financial health exhibited by news organizations has collectively declined, due to obvious cutbacks in advertising sales, their online operations have shown a great deal of traffic in the last few years, a clear result of both an uptick in direct requests for information as well as growth in crosscurrents of visitors coming by way of social services like Digg and del.icio.us."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/06/15/pew-internet-politics/>