Get ready for wall-to-wall online coverage of US election day. Every butterfly ballot, frozen voting machine lever and hanging chad could get its 15 seconds of fame.

The aim is certainly an admirable one: to make democracy totally transparent.

Twitter will be running the Twitter Vote Report (in association with the techPresident blog.) A place for anyone to broadcast his or her voting experience, Twitter says it hopes to weed out “long lines, broken machines, and registered voters who can’t vote because their names aren’t showing up on the registration rolls.”

YouTube has come up with the Videoyourvote channel (in association with PBS) to do much the same.

The exhibitionism of the YouTube generation could well clash with American voting tradition, however. More than half of US states ban voters from publicly displaying their own marked ballots, and 17 states don’t allow any recording inside polling stations at all (this is a full listing, from the Citizen Media Law Project.) I wonder how many of those personal testaments will end up coming from inside a police cell.

Whatever else, this will certainly be the most observed election day of all time. If all that voter-generated content had been around eight years ago, maybe Al Gore would have made it to the White House after all.

If software programs were cars, then Windows Vista would be the Ford Explorer and Windows Mobile would be the Ford Focus.

Why? Because these are both fine vehicles with plenty to recommend them. But tastes and customers’ needs change, and no company wants to be caught with the wrong vehicle line-up or get passed by a competitor with  better styling.

This thought is prompted by the focus on “cloud computing” at Microsoft’s developer conference in Los Angeles, which just got underway (see note below, and this report of the morning’s proceedings.) As users turn more to internet-based services and rely less on applications running on client machines, they are already starting to adopt new devices with new capabilities. Microsoft, though the king of client software, is not currently well positioned to meet this new need.

Two of the hottest new consumer trends bear this out. One is the arrival of the iPhone and, this month, Google’s first Android phone. These touch-screen handsets have turned the smartphone market upside down.

So where is Microsoft? It was only a couple of years ago, with the release of Windows Mobile 6, that it finally came up with a version of the operating system that really worked well on handsets (the general perception is that it takes Microsoft three attempts to get something right: in this case it took a few more.) But Windows Mobile has been overtaken, first by Apple and now Google. Microsoft had several years’ headstart, yet it has fallen behind in important ways and recent reports suggest that the next version of Windows Mobile won’t now see the light of day till late next year.

Vista is a different story. This is the gas guzzler that works fine when things like computing resources and power are in abundance, but doesn’t do so well in a world of scarcity. Vista doesn’t power most of the new “netbooks”, or mini-notebooks, that have become the hot new thing in the PC world: many of these are using XP, which Microsoft had hoped to consign to the dustbin by now.

All is not lost – far from it. Cloud computing is still in its infancy and Microsoft has time to adapt. On Tuesday, the company has promised to shift the focus of its developer conference to the “front end” – the technologies that users will need to access services in the cloud. Windows 7 is on the horizon and Microsoft will soon be able to close the sad chapter that was Vista. But the lesson from Detroit is clear: having a massive market share offers little protection if you stop building what customers want.

It’s not all doom and gloom among Sequoia-backed start-ups.

LinkedIn, which raised $53m in June at an eye-catching $1bn valuation, is at it again. This time the social network for professionals has pulled in another $23m – and at the same valuation, despite the collapse in stock prices since then, according to CEO Dan Nye.

When I spoke to Nye earlier, he was far more interested in talking about his new investors than the money itself. This round comes from four backers: SAP, Goldman Sachs, McGraw Hill and Bessemer Venture Partners (Note: an earlier version of this post omitted to mention Bessemer.) Nye says these strategic investors are there to open up new uses for the LinkedIn network, advancing its ambition to become a social platform on which a wider range of online business life takes place.

You can imagine, for instance, LinkedIn being built in SAPs’ enterprise software applications to power future collaboration services. According to Nye, the social network has very high penetration in the finance business, so money managers like Goldman Sachs could use it as a networking tool to do everything to drawing in more assets to checking out the references of job seekers (there are plenty of those right now.)

Also, the LinkedIn network can already be imported into the Business Exchange that has just been launched by McGraw Hill’s BusinessWeek – a service that lets users view content from around the Web that has been aggregated by people in their network.

The appearance of companies like SAP and Goldman as shareholders does not guarantee that ideas like these will pan out, of course. Nor does it necessarily mean that LinkedIn will ride out the economic downturn unscathed (Nye will only say that, for this year, revenues will rise by over 100 per cent and that membership, at 30m, is rising 2m a month.) But it is a strong endorsement for a company which has already found several ways to make money from its early lead, and which has displayed an expansive vision for extending the uses of its network.