In
the wake of yesterday's big news comes a slew of stories about the role
that social media played in the election campaign and results.  At VentureBeat, Eric Eldon provides an overview of performance stats from Facebook and MySpace,
saying: "Indeed, the electoral importance of interactive online tools
that
helped people learn about the government was obvious yesterday. Twitter
trumpeted its election-day traffic gains, as have social networks like
MySpace and Facebook."

ReadWriteWeb's Frederic Lardinois delves into a comparison of the McCain and Obama social media campaigns, based on data provided by online statistics mashup tool Trendrr, reaching the conclusion: "There are, of course, a lot of reasons for why Barack Obama's campaign
gained a lot more traction on social networks and blogs than the McCain
campaign. The demographics of social media users tend to fall in line more closely with those of today's Democratic voters,
for example. However, looking forward to the next campaign cycle, it
seems clear that all political campaigns, especially at this level,
will start ignoring social media trends at their own peril."

MG Siegler at VentureBeat comments on the notable absence of Twitter's Fail Whale during the election coverage, and asks: "Now the question for Twitter is: Where to go from here? With the
election over, will Twitter be able to hang on to all of these new
users? If they signed up for political discourse, they probably aren’t
going to be content with the standard 'What are you doing?' updates.
Or, to put it more bluntly, those that signed up to learn about
problems at polling stations probably aren’t going to care that I’m
brushing my teeth with cinnamon toothpaste."

After Ze Frank asked for his followers' thoughts and feelings about the election, prompting a flurry of responses, Mathew Ingram picked up on Frank's ability to build active online communities, asking: "Why did people choose to post such personal comments at Ze’s site? You
could argue that they would have done it anywhere, but I think the
community that he has created around himself and his quirky Web productions
has a lot to do with it, and how free people felt to respond. I also
noticed that he stepped in several times to respond, even in small ways."

All good advice to follow if you're thinking of changing the world through social media.

Election shocker: other stuff unrelated to the elections makes headlines
Elsewhere on the interwebs: Linden Labs tries to quell a rebellion in Second Life. Wagner James Au writing for GigaOM describes Second Life users' response to the proposed price hikes as "a case study in the challenges inherent in managing user-generated content".

Eric Krangel at Silicon Alley Insider
says the proposed price hikes led "to the kind of histrionics Second
Lifers do best: angry protest rants, sulky threats to quit the game,
and avatars setting themselves on fire (an act we note involves no actual pain or sacrifice)."

He goes on to dissect Linden Labs' back-pedalling on the pricing issue, saying: "First off, since the price hikes were
announced there's been the beginnings of a mass exodus to OpenSim,
an open source Second Life clone that's rapidly coming up to speed as a
fully featured alternative anyone can run for free. Secondly, a
surprising number of Second Life users aim for a revenue-neutral
existence, and pay their usage fees to Linden with profits generated
running micro-businesses selling virtual goods. But with an expensive
item in Second Life going for 250 Linden Dollars (a little less than a
buck), a $50 a month rent increase is enough to price people out of the
game altogether. And of course, there's a real-world recession going on
that's forcing people to rethink their entertainment budgets."

TechCrunch reports that LinkedIn is cutting 10% of its staff; paidContent adds that video startup Veoh will axe 20%.
Jason Kincaid writes about LinkedIn: "It’s likely that the cuts were
prompted by investors like Sequoia pushing for cost cutting (the VC
gave portfolio companies a 56 Slide Presentation of Doom last month in light of the economic crisis). But LinkedIn isn’t about to run out of money: the company just closed a $22.7 million infusion, which came on top of a $53 million Series D round in June that pegged LinkedIn’s valuation at $1 billion."

In UK media news, The Guardian names Janine Gibson as editor of Guardian.co.uk, which Jemima Kiss
describes as "part of the latest move towards its integration of
newspaper and website operations" and online journalism wunderkind Dave Lee (recently appointed co-editor of the BBC Internet Blog) posts this gem of a video in which a Birmingham Mail reporter effectively resigns by YouTube to pursue his indie publishing dreams – though his actions may be influenced by inebriation.