It's Super Tuesday -- the biggest day yet in the run-up to the presidential campaign. With 24 states holding their nominating contests today, by tomorrow we could have a much better idea of who will be his (or her) party's standard-bearer come November.

In what many have called both the most interesting and important presidential election in recent memory, the Internet is ablaze with political news, videos, real-time polling and a clutch of other interactive bells and whistles befitting the campaign that made the political Web a reality.

The Washington Post Company is seizing on the opportunity to roll out an ambitious interactive approach to its political coverage. Starting at 6:00 tonight, washingtonpost.com and Newsweek will begin a six-hour online video broadcast of the election returns.

"As leaders in political news and online technology, we are going to try something new this election season," Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, said in a statement. "This is an innovative news experience that could help shape the future of online news."

The coverage will feature comments and analysis from the top political reporters at the Post and Newsweek, as well as writers from the company's Web properties Slate and The Root.

Interactive maps with polls and delegate counts will be available, and viewers will be able to ask questions in live video discussions with the reporters and analysts.

Washingtonpost.com is also offering mobile phone alerts with updates from key primaries and caucuses for interested citizens who can't get to a computer or television.

Google's YouTube has created an area of its site dedicated to Super Tuesday coverage in its YouChoose '08 content channel.

LATEST NEWS

Apple Shares Surge, Investors Like Valuation
MessageLabs Buy a Headache for Symantec?
Dow Ends Worst Week Ever with Wild Swings
There's Method Behind Zach Nelson's Madness
Choosing the Right High-Performance File System

The site features a map of the United States (powered by Google Maps, of course) with icons that expand into political videos from users in states holding primaries today. Those videos include clips from candidates, voters and local news organizations.

Among the social Web sites, YouTube already holds a prominent position in the political arena, having partnered with CNN to co-host a Democratic and a Republican debate. Additionally, each of the major candidates has harnessed the power of viral distribution to circulate campaign ads through YouTube.

Google has also partnered with microblogging site Twitter to provide a real-time forum for folks to share their voting experiences. Similar to the YouTube feature, Google's Twitter tie-in for Super Tuesday overlays user-submitted posts on a Google Maps image of the country, offering brief, location-based blurbs about users' experiences.

Additionally, Google has created an "elections" section on its own Google News page, complete with a news feed and an election map. Once the polls begin closing this evening, Google will start adding real-time returns to its maps.

MySpace perhaps has been the most political of the social networks, thanks to its series of presidential dialogues -- during which candidates respond to MySpace users' questions in real time.

Each of the major candidates has set up a MySpace page; Sen. Barak Obama (D-Ill.) has one page for each of the 50 states.

On Facebook, where each of the major candidates also has profile pages, members are invited to respond to Super Tuesday opinion polls and follow news coverage of the primaries through the U.S. Politics application, a co-branded venture with ABC News. The application offers a side-by-side comparison of polling from ABC News set against the pulse of the Facebook community.

One survey asks Facebook members if they think that today's primaries will determine which candidate each party will nominate. (At press time, 56 percent voted "Yes for Republicans, no for Democrats"; 27 percent voted "No for both parties.")

Not all candidates are taking advantage of the Web equally, however. Obama, for instance, seems very much at home using the social Web, said Janel Landis, senior director of search development strategy at SendTec, an online marketing consultancy.

According to SendTec's research, Obama has done the best job of engaging younger voters through social networks and other online channels.

"Barak Obama was the early adopter when it came to online marketing as part of his campaign strategy," Landis told InternetNews.com.

A comparison of the two Democrats' MySpace profile pages supports that theory: Obama has 255,976 friends; Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York has 175,629 friends.

Additionally, SendTec has been studying the candidates' search-engine marketing strategies. Landis said that the Obama campaign has been much more active in bidding on search terms than Clinton.

However, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has outdone them all.

Sponsored links to McCain ads appear in a Google search for terms like "immigration reform," "Republican candidate" and even "Rudy Giuliani."

Landis told InternetNews.com that McCain had also undertaken a strategic geotargeting search campaign, bidding higher on queries placed by searchers in pivotal states in today's primaries, like California.

Many of the candidates have promoted informational videos about how and where to vote, Landis said. Inexplicably, it appeared that none had bid on two of the most popular search terms so far on Super Tuesday: "where to vote," and "where do I vote" -- Nos. 7 and 9, respectively, according to Google Trends.