Turns out you can learn a lot about our current zeitgeist by plugging in a few keywords to Google Trends. After entering a few keywords into Google Trends, it will display a nice chart showing which term is more popular on the Web. It'll even return which term wins in a variety of cities, languages and countries.

For example, I just did a Google Trends search for "McCain" and "Obama." If the election were held today, and if it only counted worldwide traffic online, Obama would be the clear winner:

He's also beating out McCain in Germany, Canada, Texas and on all Web sites written in French:

What's neat about Google Trends is that you can also export data as a CSV file for use with a spreadsheet program, such as Numbers or Excel.

If you're a beat reporter covering an election, Google Trends is certainly a good tool to use. It'll help you track news and commentary about a particular candidate, but it can also help you to follow web traffic by geography and demographic (at least when it comes to language). You might also try Google Trends on other beats: sports teams, consumer goods, government regulations, entertainment news - even our own industry!