The fact that Jon Stewart's blistering appearance on CNN's Crossfire has now been seen by hundreds of thousands of people on the Web (via Ifilm.com and bittorrent) has got bloggers, like Jeff Jarvis, talking about the "future of TV."

Dan Gillmor makes a nice counter-intuitive point in his San Jose Mercury News column today.

One out of four American adults have rated a product, service or person using online reputation systems, according to this new report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And that's not counting the under 18-year-olds!

I don't want to put TOO Pollyanna-ish a spin on it, but you have to admit, we all know a lot more about democracy, registering to vote, the electoral college and even (gasp!) the actual issues at stake in this election than in any election I've ever participated in the past.

Guess what? Internet users don't insulate themselves in information echo chambers. "Wired Americans are more aware than non-internet users of all kinds of arguments, even those that challenge their preferred candidates and issue positions." That's the news from a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, done in tandem with the University of Michigan School of Information.

Video Vote Vigil is asking for volunteer videographers to send them video of disturbances outside polling locations on Election Day. Jon Lebkowsky writes that they aren't quite set up to accept content yet, but volunteers who are willing to take their cameras to the polls can sign up now to be notified when registration and uploads are implemented.

The collection of essays now known as Extreme Democracy should appear in book form early next year, but it is coming out in serialized PDF (portadble document format) at the moment at the project's blog.

According to a set of Yahoo! Buzz reports that just fell into PDF's hands, over the four day period from Oct. 28-31, online searches for the term "John Kerry" (or related variations) outpaced searches for the term "George Bush" almost uniformly across all twelve swing states.

For example, on Sunday, the most recent day covered, searches for Kerry topped Bush in every state. I'm reading off of a chart showing bar graphs with their Yahoo "buzz scores" so these numbers are bound to be rounded:

FL: Kerry 260, Bush 240

PA: Kerry 255, Bush 230

OH: Kerry 340, Bush 310

MI: Kerry 240, Bush 210

MN: Kerry 300, Bush 225

WI: Kerry 320, Bush 260

CO: Kerry 200, Bush 160

IA: Kerry 225, Bush 200

NM: Kerry 170, Bush 100

NV: Kerry 120, Bush 50

WV: Kerry 190, Bush 130

NH: Kerry 420, Bush 260

A buzz score of 500 means that .500 of all Yahoo searches that day were to that term. At the moment, Hilary Duff has a buzz score of 100.

Overheard on the #joho irc (chat) channel on irc.freenode.net:

akma: From #joiito -- ptorrone: Overheard in line at polling place this morning.... "I think all the ones with the white headphones are voting for Kerry"

Watching the online futures markets, such as Tradesports.com, and you can see in real time how the betting on tonight's outcome has swung. An hour ago, Bush was at 36.0 and Kerry at 64.0. Now, at 10:26 pm, Bush is up at 63.0 and Kerry is down at 35.0. That's what relying on early exit polls can do...