Stories by Thomas A. Powell and Joe Lima

When you take a close look at the traffic patterns within the Web 2.0-based community, the popularity gap between the two presidential candidates increases. Obama's favored by a 4-to-1 margin compared with the 2-to-1 margin when we looked at other Internet Web traffic trends.

The tale told by other Internet traffic trends, also rings true when taking domain registration into account. Using DomainTools to query for domains, we saw 2,357 domains for Obama and 1,431 domains for McCain.

IT professionals have historically monitored network traffic patterns to better understand network usage, to expose security events, and to generally promote overall network health. Traffic analysis can likewise be applied to the Web to understand a wide range of behavior patterns ranging from social media networks to suggestion systems in e-commerce to even the current hot topic: the presidential race.