[Politics and social media]
The Prime Minister has spoken. The next General Elections, which will be due by 2012, would be one that will involve new media, he told The New Paper today.

And while doing research for my Digital Media project, I found some statistics from Jeremiah Owyang who blogs at www.web-strategist.com about the elections in the US.

Internet Usage in United States
United States Population: 303,824,646
Internet Usage: 220,141,969
Penetration rate: 72.5%
Growth from 2000-2008: 130.9%
Stats from Internet WorldStats (Census, Nielson)

Facebook
Obama: 2,379,102 supporters
McCain: 620,359 supporters
Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

MySpace
Obama: Friends: 833,161
McCain: Friends: 217,811
Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

YouTube
Obama: 1792 videos uploaded since Nov 2006, Subscribers: 114,559 (uploads about 4 a day), Channel Views: 18,413,110
McCain: 329 videos uploaded since Feb 2007 (uploads about 2 a day), Subscribers: 28,419, Channel Views: 2,032,993
Obama has 403% more subscribers than McCain
Obama has 905% more viewers than McCain

Twitter
Obama: @barackobama has 112,474 followers
McCain: @JohnMcCain 4,603 followers*
Obama has 240 times more followers in Twitter than McCain

Obama won the Presidential elections.

It suddenly dawned on me that I have been focusing too much looking at PAP politicians on Facebook and that I have not checked out how politicians from the opposition are doing. But since I am a social science student, I believe in balance.

Blogger Daryl Kang who blogs at blog.dk.sg checked out Facebook and found Low Thia Khiang and Sylvia Lim's pages. Their pages are repositories of speeches, videos and there are comments on the Wall and Discussion Board as well.

Daryl says: "Its (sic) good to see the opposition parties embracing the new media. As we all know, they don’t get a lot of coverage on the mainstream media. So I guess the new media is the way to go. And after looking at how Obama used the new media during the US presidential election, I can’t wait to see something similar happening in Singapore."

Indeed, he is right. New media will have a part to play in the next elections. And PM will be speaking about that tonight on Channel NewsAsia.