Erik Qualman has written an interesting article in Search Engine Watch. He has compared the Internet activities of each of the United States’ presidential candidates, Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, focusing on five key areas. He deems Obama as the overall online winner:

1. Website traffic (Obama is the winner): Obama’s site receives 5.5 million unique visitors, while John McCain’s site receives 3.1 million (based on Compete data).

2. Social media (Obama): Obama has over 2 million fans on Facebook, while McCain has just under 600,000.

3. Paid search (McCain): McCain has higher listings than Obama on key search terms.

4. Organic search (tie): while, for every one search for ‘McCain’ there are 2.2 searches for ‘Obama’… there are even more searches for ‘Palin’ (Republican vice-presidential candidate, Governor Sarah Palin) than Obama. In fact, there are more searches for McCain and Palin combined, compared with Obama and Biden (Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Senator Joe Biden) combined.

5. YouTube (Obama): Obama’s YouTube channel has 100,000 subscribers and his videos have been viewed 17.1 million times. John McCain’s YouTube channel has 24,000 subscribers and has been viewed just 11.1 million times.

How any of this translates into actual votes remains to be seen… but not too long to go now!

Source: Erik Qualman, “Obama is Winning the Internet War”, Search Engine Watch, October 16, 2008

Setting a record for the most downloads in one day, the new version of Firefox - Firefox 3 - was downloaded more than 8 million times on its release day last week (June 17).

I was one of those who downloaded the new version of Firefox and haven’t looked back since. I’ve always regarded Firefox as the browser for Internet marketers (mainly because of the wealth of search engine optimization plugins it enables) and the new version only reinforces this belief.

If you haven’t downloaded Firefox 3 I suggest you do so!

Sources: Vasanth Sridharan , “Firefox 3 Crushes Download Goal: 8 Million + In First Day”, Silicon Alley Insider, June 18, 2008, Mozilla.com