US. President Barack Obama used the Internet like no politician before to help win the presidential race.

Since taking office, he gained permission to carry a Blackberry -- albeit one with beefed up security -- because he felt it important to use the mobile device to talk to people outside the White House world.

If you won't get a chance to catch a glimpse of him today in Ottawa, then consider his online presence. He's still there, but oh, things have changed.

Let's start at www.whitehouse.gov. This is the official site of the president and on the day of his inauguration the site received an upgrade including its first blog. Obama's staff includes a director of new media who has been writing some of the blog material. Obama comments are only his official statements. The site also includes one thing promised by Obama, the posting of legislation for five days to allow public comment before he takes any action.

Moving on, there is www.recovery.gov which focuses on the details of the multi-billion dollar stimulus program -- delivering his political message directly to the masses.

On his Facebook page, there are 5.4 million "supporters" and a constant stream of messages posted by those wishing him well -- but Obama's last message is from a month ago. The same story at his MySpace page; and Twitter postings all stopped shortly before inauguration day.

On the unofficial obamabarack.blogspot.com, there's a steady stream of political postings about the president's activities while at barackobama.com the site starts with a request for a donation to the Democratic Party and continues in a partisan vein. The president's YouTube channel is humming, with nearly 2,000 videos of his political speeches.

In all you can find his trail on more than a dozen social networking sites yet current efforts are focused on the White House site and YouTube.

Blogger interest has dropped off. Daily postings with his name are now running at about 4,000 to 5,000 a day according to Technorati. At the time of his inauguration, it was about 30,000 a day.

By the way, our prime minister gets about the same number of blog mentions per day as the Ottawa Senators.

Website of the week:

www.tweetag.com - It allows for fast search of the Twitter conversations on the go and glance at the top 40 subjects.

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