Want to know how the U.S. presidential candidates, Senator John McCain (Republican Party) and Senator Barack Obama (Democratic Party) compare on technology and Internet policy?

Here are two videos that give an indication of where the candidates stand on the issues as they see them:

John McCain:

Barack Obama:

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