Joe Trippi is one of the few political consultants who speaks frankly, even to the detriment of his clients, and loves democracy even more than he loves politics. I caught up with him for an hour-long conversation about his work for the John Edwards campaign, why Hillary Clinton might be the Howard Dean of 2008, and how the Iowa caucus is like the Internet.

According to Google Trends, Barack Obama has been the subject of more Google searches than any other presidential candidate, and aside from Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee he blows everyone else out of the water. And he's exploding on YouTube.

While we were sleeping, there was a Wyoming primary, but few candidates mention the results on their sites; The Barocket is back! Barack Obama's online popularity has skyrocketed since his win in Iowa; Facebook's role in Saturday's debates may have underwhelmed, but it did give voters a chance to spout off; Ron Paul is excluded from yesterday's GOP debate and no one really knows why; citizen journalists the Uptake post a video about their process in Iowa; and Joe Garofoli describes the intricate dance campaigns perform to turn online support into offline action and to court the youth vote.

The first U.S. presidential primary of 2008 is over and it was full of surprises. After the first inning, we have an unexpected lead, thanks to Mike Huckabee connecting to intact networks that had a long history together, while Mitt Romney connected to individual voters -- one at a time. We have heard that "all politics are local", now we also find out that "all politics are social".

When I first floated the idea of collecting Iowa Caucus results through the microblogging social network Twitter, I wasn't sure what to expect. Iowa is a small state, and not particularly known for tech-savviness. Would I find anyone willing to whip out their phone in the middle of a caucus and text in the results?

Barack Obama's campaign put its Facebook page to a new use just days before the Iowa caucuses. Fans, or supporters, of Barack Obama received a message asking to remind their friends in Iowa to caucus.

The message, titled "3 Days to Go," directs supporters to a page with all of their friends who have some connection to Iowa. You can check off the friends you want to invite to the caucus, and then send them a reminder to caucus on Thursday.

Cool new maps illustrated the political blogosphere like never before; Voter Search lets you find out your voting status in New York State; the Iowa Caucus Calculator makes caucus calculus easy; Mitt Romney and John McCain have dominated the buying of online ads; the RNC is obsessed with Hillary Clinton.

The Environmental Law and Policy Center gets up to $10,000 worth of Google ads provided free of charge each month to help promote its green efforts, including one aimed at reaching Iowa caucus voters. A search for "Hillary Clinton" turns up an ad suggesting that users "Learn how Hillary Clinton proposes to solve global warming." Targeted to presidential candidate names, the ads link to IowaGlobalWarming.org, and are part of a year-long campaign set to finalize after January's Iowa caucuses.

Can the Internet do a better job at covering election night than the media? We are about to find out.

I would like to launch an experiment with Twitter on Iowa Caucus night. If you're caucusing in Iowa on January 3rd, sign up for Twitter, make sure you have the mobile feature turned on for the night, and send a Twitter a text message with your caucus location and the results in 140 characters or less. If possible, please send your message from inside the caucus location as the vote totals are being announced. Make sure your tweet contains the word "caucus" or is prefixed "@IowaCaucus" so we'll pick it up at the account we have designated for this purpose. We'll be tabulating the results and providing a real-time tally of our totals in the Republican and Democratic Caucuses.

Read on for more about what will unfold on January 3rd...

Democracy for America, the organizing network that grew out of the ashes of the Dean campaign, has announced the results of its "Pulse Poll" on the Democratic presidential race. With more than 150,000 votes cast, the winner is Dennis Kucinich, with 49,000. He did not get the 66% required to get DfA's endorsement, however.