Reuters: “‘We highlighted to them that this was an important form of communication,’ said the [unnamed U.S.] official of the conversation the department had with Twitter at the time of the disputed Iranian election. He declined further details.”

CNN: “Senior officials say the State Department asked Twitter to refrain for going down for periodic scheduled maintenance at this critical time to ensure the site continues to operate. Bureau’s and offices across the State Department, they say, are paying very close attention to Twitter and other sites to get information on the situation in Iran.”

UPDATE: Even the State Department can’t keep Twitter up forever. It’s nighttime in Tehran and Twitter is down — the company’s status blog dedicated to stuff like this indicates it should be shuttered from about 5pm tp 6:30 pm eastern time. UPDATE2: It’s back!

Huffpo’s newest round values the company at about $100 million, which means its investors think it will be worth much more one day. That’s the same value, more or less, that investors place on TheStreet (TSCM), even though it generated some $65 million last year and has about $80 million in cash on hand. McIntyre:

Huffington has several important advantages over TheStreet. For starters, it does not rely on one person for most of its traffic. If Jim Cramer left TSCM, the company would be in real trouble.

Second, Huffington has diversified beyond it political news base. Over the next year or so, it will become clear whether that was a good idea or not. Adding “style” and “entertainment” sections puts it into competition with a lot of other online success stories.

Third, Huffington aggregates a lot of content from around the web. The cost of doing this is remarkably low. The company pays little if anything to most of its bloggers. TheStreet has a relatively large staff and produces most of its own content.

The final difference between the two companies is probably the most telling. At its current rate of growth, which could be hurt by the end of the 2008 election process, Huffington may double in size again over the next year or so, if its efforts to diversify its content works.

It would be hard to find analysts who believe TSCM is going to expand its audience or revenue at a rate of 100%.”

I can think of some counter-arguments to this, but they’re half-hearted: TSCM’s affluent readers should be worth more to advertisers than Huffpo’s; TSCM still has a revenue stream from subscribers to buffet it from ad market turmoil; Huffpo’s aggregation model isn’t unique and could be replicated by anyone who wants to hire some devilishly clever Web editors, etc.

But better to acknowledge that the HuffPo crew have built something very big, very fast. And that anyone who does that gets rewarded for it, even in an econalypse.

But, for the record, here’s another winner: YouTube. This has nothing to do with the fact that Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt stumped for Obama, but with the fact that YouTube users are furiously uploading versions of Obama’s Tuesday evening victory speech.

Video tracking service Visible Measures says it has tracked more than 500 versions of the clip embedded below (primarily on YouTube), which had generated some 6.8 million views by this morning. At least two million of those are coming from Obama’s official channel.

But as Obama bumps go, this one is relatively small. As of this afternoon, the speech had yet to crack YouTube’s most popular videos of the month page, which is where we learned that a new video of a nearly-naked Britney Spears has been viewed more than nine million times.

New York has three dailies (four if you count The Wall Street Journal, even more if you count specialty papers like the Spanish-language El Diario) and it’s impossible to buy any of them at newsstands today, according to an informal channel check conducted by … me.

Capitalism/speculation to the rescue: eBay (EBAY) seller jel2maine has 15 copies of today’s New York Times, and is asking for a mere $19.99 plus $3.99 shipping.

That’s a 1500 percent markup over the paper’s street price of $1.50. Any takers?

UPDATE: You may want to hold off before bidding. Dave Martin, a media watcher based in Madison, Wis., says a Times employee tells him the paper is rushing out an additional 50,000 copies this afternoon.

Confirmed–here’s New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis:

Yes, we are going back on press to print 50,000 copies of today’s paper for distribution at Grand Central, Penn Station, Port Authority and other select locations.

We had increased our print run for single copy sales today by about 35%. In 2004 we saw an increase in sales of around 50,000 copies the day after the election and based on what we’ve seen today, we expect to significantly surpass those sales.  We also plan to increase our print run for single copy sales tomorrow, although not as much as today.

I’m sure you know that today and tomorrow we have a special election section in the paper and, of course, on NYTimes.com, we have all sorts of features including, interactive graphics with all the presidential, senate and congressional election results by state and county, live updates on the blogs on the contested Senate race in Minnesota and the uncertainty of who will fill one of Alaska’s Senate seats. We also have a video of this campaign, going back to the primaries, called ‘Choosing a President,’ which is quite extraordinary.

According to our internal numbers, yesterday was a record day for NYTimes.com. There were 55.1 million page views, shattering the previous record by 29%.  We don’t have numbers yet for today. We’ve had record mobile page views of 2.7 million at NYTimes.com.”

[Image Credit: specialkrb]

No matter. If it works, it’s going to make a lot of people happy. So who’s biting?

Well, Ben & Jerry’s, for one. The groovy ice cream maker–owned by less-groovy conglomerate Unilever (UN), but who’s counting?–is one of Facebook’s favorite examples of a brand that has used the site to do more than just generate click-throughs. Last spring, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg talked up a free cone promotion that drove hundreds of thousands of people to the chain’s stores.

So if it worked once, why not do it again? The two are running a new version of the promotion today, with Ben & Jerry’s sponsoring Facebook’s election page, which features a Google (GOOG) map that tells voters both where to vote and where the nearest B&J outlet is. Pretty clever, really.

Also clever: Facebook’s running total of users who’ve declared that they’ve voted in today’s election, which stands at about 2.06 million as I type this. Since this is a self-reported number and one that doesn’t come tethered to any other demographic information, it’s statistically useless.

But that won’t stop endless commentators from using the stat tonight and in the days to come as an indicator of what the “youth vote” did or didn’t do today. Which, of course, will drive more traffic back to Facebook–and Ben & Jerry’s.