The U.S. Internet users seem to be fed up with Hillary and Obama and  are experiencing election fatigue.  The sign of this fatigue is reflected in their search behavior which has changed over a period of time.  According to a study by Hitwise, the number of Obama and Hillary searches have sharply declined post February and the March 22 – April 5th fortnight has seen the lowest number of searches after December.  Though the chart below shows data about the Democrats only but the effect of election fatigue is similar for searches related to John McCain as well.

Heather Hopkins from Hitwise also mentions a quote from 50 cent, a rapper, who told Economist

To be honest, I haven’t been following [the Democratic campaign] any more. I lost my interest.

We understand how difficult and time consuming it is to track your favorite candidate with so many news and views available across the Internet.  I even wrote about The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room which now proves to be a great destination for easy tracking of the election campaign.

In the last election, we certainly lost the Internet war, the cyber war. It was a very, very serious mistake on our part. It was painful … but it came at the right time, not too late.

The party, which experienced the biggest setback in the 51 years rule, lost its traditional majority though it was able to retain the power. The party spent heavily on government controlled media like newspaper and television during the election campaign but failed to woo the younger crowd. On the other hand, the opposition, which was denied fair access to the government controlled traditional media, used Internet to spread its messages on the subjects like corruption, inflation etc.

Now, the ruling party is reaching out to bloggers and have pledged not to curb bloggers from writing about government related issues. The new Information Minister Ahmad Shabery said,

If there is something newsworthy, I don’t see anything wrong in them posting it. Everyone has the freedom to use the blogs as an information distribution center.

It’s surely a great sign for Internet and high time that the government agencies across the world understand the power of blogging Internet. Instead of restricting bloggers from writing about issues, the governments should try to take constructive feedback coming from these blogs and try to improve the system. The bloggers also need to understand the democratic and viral power of blogging and thus act responsibly while posting anything on the Internet.