It’s not everyday that a single news event makes the homepage of every single news site across the globe at the same time. But the U.S. election results did just that. Many news sites experienced record-breaking numbers including CNN.com which served 276 million pageviews to 27 million unique visitors on Tuesday. Akamai, the content delivery network for most of the top news sites, reported a peak of 8,572,042 visitors per minute around 11pm last night. Hitwise compiled the traffic stats for the top 24 news sites from yesterday.

Shortly after Barack Obama was declared the projected winner, I started taking full-page screenshots of the homepages from as many news sites that I could think of. I did this to partly study the designs and partly to preserve the historic night. You can download the complete collection of screengrabs in a complete 50MB zip.

Below is a collage of screenshots of the homepages from 24 major news outlets just after Barack Obama was announced as the winner. Clicking the picture links to a bigger version on Flickr.

With Super Tuesday right around the corner, what is an undecided web geek to do? Why break a decision down into technical specs, like any other decision they have ever had to make.

Robert Accettura did a little survey of the presidential-hopefuls websites and noted what technologies were used on the front and backend. If you were to vote solely on who is using the best web technologies, your best bet would be Barack Obama. His site is run on an open source operating system, uses a CSS based design, as well as HTTP compression. Hillary Clinton and half of the Republican candidates are running Microsoft IIS; surprise, surprise! This survey also showed how web standards has come a long way as all of the candidates but one (Mike Gravel) neglected using a table-based layout.

Does a well-built website architecture make for a great leader? Probably not. But if you are a web geek you will probably get a kick out of these stats, just like me. Check out Roberts page for the complete breakdown.

We are a good year and a half away from the 2008 United States Presidential Election but people are getting all worked up about the political season. Deciding who to stand behind used to be a rather complex task of researching a candidate and deciphering their message to see if they are for or against a certain issue. Luckily there are lots of people using the Internet to make it a cinch for you to pick.

At DEHP.net/candidate you can choose if you are for or against various issues including abortion rights, Iraq, net neutrality, same-sex marriage, universal healthcare etc. and how important that issue is to you. It will then spit out the rankings of the candidates that are the best match for you including the issues they disagree with you. Here is how I stacked up:

Kucinich 55
No Child Left Behind

Obama 40
Patriot Act, Same-Sex Marriage

Edwards 39
No Child Left Behind, Patriot Act, Iran – Military Action, Same-Sex Marriage

Clinton 39
No Child Left Behind, Patriot Act, Iran – Military Action, Same-Sex Marriage

Dodd 35
No Child Left Behind, Patriot Act, Iran – Military Action

Biden 34
No Child Left Behind, Patriot Act, Same-Sex Marriage

Gravel 33
(you have no disagreements with this candidate)

Richardson 33
Assault Weapons Ban, Patriot Act, Iran – Military Action, Same-Sex Marriage

McCain -8
Giuliani -12
Paul -12
Thompson -14
Cox -23
Huckabee -28
Brownback -37
Romney -38
Tancredo -48
Hunter -50

As you can see Dennis Kucinich is the best match for my views with Barack Obama, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton right behind. All of the data was collected from www.2decide.com/table.htm, which gives a great overview of all the candidates.

Now that only took me 15 minutes including writing up this blog entry.