The Pew Internet & American Life Project is releasing another of its ongoing reports tracking Americans' use of the internet today (and someone leaked us an advance copy), and this report contains some really important news:

In the national elections held last week in Holland, the right-of-center Christian Democratic Appeal party won the most seats in the parliament, but while these results were seen as proof of a "public schizophrenia" regarding the treatment and acceptance of immigrants, there was another underlying element to the election that reflected the evolving role of technology in national polls.

A non-partisan Dutch group called the Instituut voor Publik en Politiek, or the Dutch Centre for Political Participation, created a web-based voter guide called the StemWijzer that polls voters' political preferences. Voters take a ten-minute test called VoteMatch that asks yes/no questions ranging from "Citizens should elect a prime minister" to "A homeowner receives tax relief on mortgage interest. This scheme should be made less advantageous for people in the higher income groups who take out a new mortgage" to "No new mosques may be built." After users have answered all of the questions, StemWijzer recommends which parties to vote for based on the user's answers.

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki looks at the ability of large, disconnected groups to make accurate decisions and predictions.

Group intelligence may be good at telling how many jelly beans are in a jar or remembering the year Nirvana released Nevermind. But how does it perform under conditions of true uncertainty, when the right answer is seemingly unknowable -- because it hasn't happened yet?

The folks behind Predict06 are hoping to answer this question (or to just have fun, or both). The site, which launched this week, is a good example of using game-like metaphors to play with the political moment. It uses a fun and simple concept: ask the community who they think will win the upcoming congressional and gubernatorial elections and chart the results.

The folks at the Bivings Group have done a nice survey report looking at the use of the internet in 2006 Senate campaigns, covering a total of 77 campaign committees (30 incumbents and 47 challengers).

The big picture will not surprise you: while almost 100% have live websites, most use them mainly as online billboards to broadcast their candidate's message (with news, bio and contact info) and to pull in money and volunteers. Few are using the web to interact with their supporters in a more meaningful way (only 23% have a blog, and even fewer--4%--are offering team building tools or using their sites to help supporters create their own house parties or fundraising campaigns).

Among the most interesting findings:

-Democrats are far more likely to offer Spanish versions of their websites than Republicans (22% vs 8%).

-Democrats are twice as likely to use RSS feeds (24% vs 13%).

-Challengers are far more likely than incumbents to use interactive and cutting-edge tools like blogs (32% vs 10%), podcasts (9% vs 0), and RSS (28% vs 3%).

**Update 4.11.2006**
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I'm just digging into the USC Annenberg Digital Future Project's 123-page report, "Surveying the digital Future," which comes out tomorrow, but here are a few highlights that caught my eye:

-The political affiliations of Internet users are significantly to the left of non-users. 32% of Internet users identify as somewhat or very liberal, compared to 25% of non-users. Likewise, while 40% of non-users identify as somewhat or very conservative, 36% of net users do so.

-The percentage of Internet users who agree with the statement that "by using the Internet, people like you can better understand politics" has gone up from 52% in 2003 to more than 60% today.

-Likewise, the percentage of net users who agree that using the Internet can help "people like you ... have more political power" has jumped from 27% in 2003 to about 40% today.

None of these trends are surprising, but it's always useful to have some fresh data points.

BlogKits, a service devoted to helping bloggers find ways to generate revenue, reports that 71 percent of bloggers surveyed said that advertisements are acceptable on blogs. [Full disclosure: I often purchase ads on blogs for clients of mine.]

It’s interesting to think back just a few months ago when many bloggers rejected the notion of selling ads on their websites. Now, Google contextual links and Henry Copeland’s Blogads are seen less as an annoyance and more as a right of passage. The presence of ads seems to indicate a steady stream of traffic capable of sustaining an advertising business. Are blogads the new legitimizer?

Another interesting point is that 52 percent of those surveyed said they could earn a living off of their online journals.

The number of blogs is growing by about 40,000 a day, about four times the rate for most of last year, and the total number of blogs is rapidly approaching 8 million, reports brother Dave at Technorati. Most of the growth, he says, "can be attributed to the increase in new, mainstream services such as MSN Spaces, and in increases of use of services like Blogger, AOL Journals, and LiveJournal. In addition, services outside the United States have been taking off, including a number of media sites promoting blogging, such as Le Monde in France." There's also a dark side, he notes, which is the rise of fake blogs whose sole purpose is to artificially inflate the number of links to a site, but most of those are not counted in Technorati's data.

More and more, with data like this in mind, I'm thinking that we should stop using terms like "blog" and "MSM" and instead talk about "small media" and "big media" and maybe "networked media" and "non-networked media" with the main distinctions being how much traffic a site gets, how large its operating budget may be, and the extent to which the site links to others, not the particular publishing technology being used.

Kerry voters were two-and-a-half times as likely to participate in online discussions or chat groups about the election than Bush voters, almost twice as likely to register their opinions in online surveys, and four-and-a-half times as likely to contribute money online to a candidate, according to the just-released Pew Internet study. Remember the "gender gap"? Now it looks like there's an "Internet gap."

Patrick Ruffini, Bush-Cheney '04's webmaster, has helpfully placed the relevant chart on his blog, and he argues that, contrary to appearances, there's mixed news for the left in this finding. Democrats, he suggests, "tend to excel at the web-only kind" of e-activism, "while the Republicans focus on building powerful synergies between the online and the offline." He continues:

And the web-only kind of activism has a mixed track record at best. At first, MoveOn's "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad contest seemed like a trailblazing concept. Until you saw the God-awful ad that won, and realized that, like most MoveOn initiatives before or since, all that energy was simply being dumped into a rat hole. Just how credible and useful are online polls when your guy wins with 90% of the vote? And using a chat room or posting a comment on a blog is not in itself a productive political act; for one thing, you could be out talking to undecideds instead of preaching to the online choir, and secondly, in the blogosphere, quality matters more than quantity. A thousand blogs echoing the WaPo/NYT line will never be as effective as fifty blogs providing an interesting and original alternative voice, probing for weaknesses in the MSM Death Star.

My two cents: Like most debates about the relative merits of different political strategies, this one is colored indelibly by the fact that the Republicans won. GOP e-activists are also doing a good job of presenting themselves as the most net-savvy, most concerned with pushing power to the edges of their network, etc.