Let us observe that the current US presidential election has raised the bar on a no-holds-barred fight over the Internet for voters.

Both the Republican and Democratic campaigns provide examples of how the Internet can be leveraged in the path to power. For one, Barack Obama's early advantage in fundraising was in part due to his campaign providing supporters with a means to make small donations via the Internet, quickly and easily.

Those small donations added up to help him become a record-breaking fundraiser for a US presidential election. Obama also gained publicity by announcing his vice-president choice via email to anyone who signed up to receive it, neatly circumventing the media filter.

The Republicans are no slouch at using the Internet either. Until very recently the Republican party's website (www.rnc.org) was devoted to displaying at least five sub-sites devoted to vicious attacks on Obama's positions.

These have since been taken down, but the ticker announcing the time since the last 'gaffe' of his gaffe-prone vice-presidential candidate is still up.

You can also find the link to BarackBook.com, which leads you to an attack website on the man. Or you can sign up to a related Facebook site.

By comparison the Democratic websites seem less to be about attacking John McCain than about presenting their man in a positive way, or countering the Republican attacks. This is not to say they are angels, just circumspect in aiming at their target directly.

The McCain campaign has also outsmarted the Obama one by apparently outbidding them to buy up Google search terms such as 'Joe Biden'.

If you do a search on Google in the US ad apparently pops up linking to McCain's site with a video showing Biden criticising Obama.

A survey in June by Pew found that a record-breaking 46 percent of Americans have used the Internet, email or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views and mobilise others.

Obama's backers were found to have an edge back then in the "online political environment", as Pew calls the phenomenon. About 35 percent of those surveyed said they have watched online political videos, nearly triple that number in the 2004 race.

About 10 percent said they had used social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace to gather information or become involved. At the time about six percent said they had made a political contribution online, compared with two percent who did so during the entire 2004 campaign.

I would love to see the results of an updated survey.

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Someone put some controls on the 'send" button! Two recent incidents highlight the need for companies to put some sort of double, even triple, even quadruple controls when sending information out.

Last week someone at Bloomberg mistakenly hit the send (or publish) button on a prepared obituary for Steve Jobs, the head of Apple. It is normal media practice to keep updated obit biographies on file of important people, just in case they die suddenly.

However such files are usually well protected from accidentally being published ahead of the person's actual death. In this case, someone at Bloomberg apparently updated the file and accidentally sent it over the wire service. Bloomberg quickly retracted the unintended obituary, but embarrassed itself in any case.

Such a false story could easily have led to a major market movement in Apple shares if it had not been retracted so fast.

Such a glitch by the media is not confined to the age of the internet, when many of us have learned to check our emails before clicking 'send', or have we? "The report of my death was an exaggeration," Mark Twain said in a cable from London to a New York newspaper in May 1897 after it mistakenly published his obituary.

The other incident occurred when someone in Google's 'mailroom' accidentally sent out ahead of time a digital comic book with details of the company's new browser, called Chrome.

"As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit 'send' a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome," the company said this week in making the comic publicly available ahead of the launch on Tuesday.

Your business is not immune to this. Back in 2003 an internal memo sent throughout the Watson Wyatt company in the US announced that 20 staff had been notified that their positions were being "eliminated".

Unfortunately the notices had not been sent yet. According to reports, the person who sent the email had intended to hit 'save' but instead hit 'send', which is just above 'save' in the Outlook 'File' menu.

Send any comments to elamin.ahmed@gmail.com