Kay Hagan had her picture taken with Barack Obama.

In a sign of the Democratic presidential candidate's perceived strength in North Carolina, the Senate candidate got a snapshot with him at a Charlotte rally on Sept. 21.

The photo is available for download on Hagan's Flickr site and her campaign Web site and has shown up on Hagan supporters' Facebook profiles, among other places.

She also had two casual photos taken of the two talking with a voter.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beverly Perdue had a snapshot taken with Obama for use on a mailer sent to black voters in the primary.

Although U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole was closely tied to George W. Bush in 2002, it's unusual for a North Carolina Democratic Senate candidate to be so closely — and visibly — tied to the party's presidential nominee.

Is John Edwards Web 2.0 strategy working?

A study of Web surfing habits of visitors to the presidential candidates official Web sites does not show any impressive numbers for Edwards' other sites.

The former North Carolina senator has embraced the Internet in his 2008 campaign, using Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace, not to mention Essembly, PartyBuilder, 43 Things, Ning, Metacafe and TagWorld.

But a survey by Politico.com and Compete shows visitors to JohnEdwards.com were not any more likely to visit his social networking sites than those on other Democratic campaign sites.

In addition, Edwards was not generating any more traffic:

Traffic to [U.S. Sen. Barack] Obama’s official website in September was almost 20 percent higher than that of [U.S. Sen. Hillary] Clinton, whose traffic was itself twice as high as that of former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.