First POST: Granite

• Above, Mitt Romney fights through the media scrum to begin yesterday's New Hampshire primary day in video from Capital New York.

• Even though Google saw a 224 percent gain in search volume for Jon Huntsman, particularly after his debate performance, the former Utah governor — who had spent months campaigning in New Hampshire ahead of Tuesday's primary — still came in third in Granite State voting, behind Mitt Romney and Ron Paul.

• Pittsburgh is saving 25 percent in email support costs by switching from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps.

• Los Angeles is beta-testing its first new website in 12 years, per GovTech.

• Poynter took a close look at how WNYC and a few other news websites using data directly from Google managed to beat the Associated Press in reporting results during the Iowa Caucus.

• Nextgov reports that petition submissions to the We the People e-petition site have slowed dramatically. Whether because the newness of the site is fading or so many pedestrian responses to many petitions have been received, the crowdsourcing endeavor is struggling to become the indispensable tool many hoped it would be.

• Honest Appalachia, a new WikiLeaks-style document-dump site for Pennsylvania, West Virginia and the rest of the Appalachian region, has launched. The site hopes to provide support for whistleblowers who see improper behavior on the part of entities from coal and gas companies to local and state government. The site promises to prevent the identities of their whistleblowers from being exposed, even in the face of legal action and hope their model spreads to other regions across the world. It begins with a focus on seven states.

• In case you missed it: A New York Times magazine piece took an extensive look at Stephen Colbert's growing role in politics, particularly with his Super PAC Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which also bought ads in Iowa ahead of the Ames straw poll in August:

  Colbert says that education isn't his aim with the super PAC - being funny is. Nevertheless, he proudly showed me that if you Google the phrase "super PAC," his name is one of the first that shows up, and the evolution of his super PAC has lately been the show's big, ongoing narrative. As Potter pointed out, when Colbert began his super PAC, he wasn't sure how a super PAC worked; he just knew he wanted one. Now he is full of plans, most of them confidential, for more "grand actions," as he calls them. Colbert declined to tell me how much money was in his super PAC's treasury, pointing out that "that's what PACs do - they don't have to tell you." But there are almost 170,000 names on the super PAC's e-mail list, and some 30,000 people have given him money.

• This afternoon, NBC is hosting a web discussion between members of the Occupy and Tea Party movements.

• NYT eXaminer , a group supportive of Wikileaks and critical of the New York Times, announced it had filed a Freedom of Information request "for records ranging the two year period from January 1, 2010 to December 31, 2011 and pertaining to any communication between the State Department and the New York Times regarding the Collateral Murder video, Afghan and Iraq War Logs, Cablegate, and related WikiLeaks material."

• The military has been using software called Vocus to track news media and social media reaction to last month's Bradley Manning trial, Politico reported.

• ICANN will begin accepting applications tomorrow from people interested in setting up new top-level domains, despite concern from marketing and industry groups that the new top-level domain program would create more opportunities to infringe on trademarks and impersonate certain entities, like banks, in pursuit of passwords and financial information. Leaders in Congress have also expressed concern that the process is going too fast.

• The United States is investigating whether an Indian spy unit hacked into the e-mails that monitor economic and security relations between the United States and China, including cyber-security issues.

• Following the success of a wiki-site which helped reveal that a former German defense minister had plagiarized his doctoral thesis, German Internet users have now launched a similar effort to tackle a new scandal surrounding the German President. According to news reports, the president left a threatening message on the voice mail of the editor-in-chief of Germany's main tabloid newspaper to interfere with the publication of a news story over a questionable home loan. Since the president has not given his consent to release the full voice mail, the site is attempting to reconstruct the message based on the parts of it that have been reported in the media. (in German)

• The Vatican admitted that it had used Wikipedia in its news release detailing the biographical information of the newly named cardinals. "One clue was that many new cardinals were described as being "Catholic," the BBC reported.

• Iran's police chief has called Google "a tool for for spying," Search Engine Land notes.

• The Russian blogger Alexei Navalny, who played a key role in protests last month, has accused the Putin government of smearing him with photoshopped images showing him with Russian fugitive businessman Boris Berezovsky in a newspaper, the BBC reported. Navalny published the original photo online, showing him with Mikhail Prokhorov, a Russian billionaire who is a candidate in the March election. In response, other Russian bloggers have been mocking the propaganda image by photoshopping Navalny with a space alien and Josef Stalin. At the same time, a non-government organization posted videos online alleging that an ally of the Kremlin had falsified registration documents.

• The Israeli government has vowed to go after a Saudi teenager who has claimed to have posted thousands of Israeli credit card numbers online.

  [The] Israeli government likened the action to "a breach of sovereignty comparable to a terrorist operation, and must be treated as such," according to Reuters.Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said in a speech that Israel had not yet ruled out the possibility that the hacking had been carried out by a group "more organized and sophisticated ... than a lone youth," Reuters reports...The hacker claims to have published details about 400,000 Israelis and blamed the "Zionist lobby" for covering up the size of the leak, in remarks published on the Internet on Thursday.

With Miranda Neubauer and Raphael Majma
This post has been updated to accurately reflect Honest Appalachia's coverage area.