Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, says what I’ve been thinking for awhile:

Okay, all the arguments have been made. And I am ready to declare a winner in the 2008 race.

The Internet. (The other winner will have to wait until Tuesday night).

From the way campaigns connect to supporters, to the way those campaigns are covered, to the way voters decide who to vote for, 2008 has delivered the first truly 21st century presidential race. And election night promises to fortify the Internet’s victory.

The post goes on to link to all the usual suspects — FiveThirtyEight, TalkingPointsMemo – as well as the Google Elections page, which has some great information going on there, including an embeddable map for results.

Google is so much more than just search, as many people know, and one of their services that I’ve been playing with recently is Google Forms. There are many uses for setting up a form — you can create a survey or poll, have folks self-populate a contact list, enter all of your travel expenses — and google makes it very easy. The results are stored in a google spreadsheet, accessible from anywhere, and there is even a tool to analyze your answers.

My first public form is set up to survey people about the price of heating oil here in Maine — a concern shared by most everyone I know.  I embedded it into a page to make it easy to find, and easy to fill out. Check it out! (And if you are a Mainer who’s bought oil, fill it out, too! It’ totally anonymous.)

Maine Oil Prices