If there’s something to be said about Vice Presidents, it’s that they can wield unlikely power. They may be just background figures at times, men who are simply one heartbeat away from becoming President themselves. But if the last roughly 60 years are any indication, Vice Presidents have increasingly garnered more power: Richard Nixon’s brilliant foreign advisory skills in the early Cold War; Lyndon B. Johnson’s control of the Senate; and, most recently, Dick Cheney’s masterful undermining of the Constitution and implementation of torture into military doctrine.

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Thanks to the Web, 2008 marks a high point in the level of engagement between American voters and their presidential candidates. As Arianna Huffington declared yesterday, “I am ready to declare a winner in the 2008 race. The Internet.”

On Election Day itself, that statement is more apt than ever. Sites like fivethirtyeight.com and politicalwire.com will provide the virtually up-to-the-minute numbers on every race. It’s a level of immediacy that was hard to imagine before now–but it’s also hard to imagine we ever had it any other way.

Here’s a quick index of AllThingsD’s digital-eye view of the fracas:

• An overview of the tech policies of both candidates.
• Election in your pocket: Walt Mossberg discovered Election ’08, a data-packed app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that uses an algorithmic calculation of who’s winning in each state based on multiple available polls.

Some would argue that this race could be decided by viral video campaigns, rather than strictly political ones. Here is the evidence:

• “Saturday Night Live” was the heavy hitter here, and it was kind of a toss-up whether John McCain and Sarah Palin’s respective appearances trumped the outright parodies of each one.
• Then there was Hollywood’s ironic plea not to vote.
• And Google’s plea (with help from The Donald) to employers for a “Vote Hour.”
• No one came close to Sarah Silverman in terms of outright exhortation, though.

Just as many of you settled into your seats to watch Thursday evening’s debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, Allen Stern of CenterNetworks was attracting his own crowd on Twitter after raising a question that strikes at heart of the blogosphere.

“It’s clear the link economy is broken,” he wrote, pointing to a write-up CNET News published on Friendster’s support for Facebook applications. The piece contained nine links, six of which pointed to previous CNET posts.

Not long after, Matthew Ingram piled on with a post dinging us for attempting “to prove how authoritative” we are “by making it look as though the only stories worth linking to are their own.

To say that their internal links are better than anything else they could possibly link to is just ridiculous.”

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By choosing Joe Biden as their vice presidential candidate, the Democrats have selected a politician with a mixed record on technology who has spent most of his Senate career allied with the FBI and copyright holders, who ranks toward the bottom of CNET’s Technology Voters’ Guide, and whose anti-privacy legislation was actually responsible for the creation of PGP. That’s probably okay with Barack Obama: Biden likely got the nod because of his foreign policy knowledge. The Delaware politician is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee who voted for the war in Iraq, and is reasonably well-known nationally after his presidential campaigns in 1988 and 2008.

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