Alongside their respective political campaigns, the past few months gave the world a fascinating insight into the personal lives of two prominent US senators and their running mates.

The Obama campaign made widespread use of blogs and social networks, and one of the highlights for me was the set of photos posted on Flickr from election night. Showing Obama in his hotel rooms in Chicago, they offer a glimpse of just how tense it must have been.

That's about as tense we were most of the evening. I am blown away that we have a President that tweets, does iPhone apps and uses Flickr. I just can't get over that. — tokenygaard

Also reported (and I’m sure you saw this coming) was the fact that Barack Obama is an avid Skype user. We heard the news first from Italian magazine Panorama, which reports that he read the Harry Potter books to his daughters using Skype every evening during his campaign.

Updated: My Italian’s not great, so it’s possible that I mistranslated the original report. We don’t know for sure whether or not Barack Obama used Skype to read Harry Potter. He’s definitely a Skype user, though – I just wish we knew if he uses it for video calling

Lastly, there’s the Obama family's dog dilemma: [via Malthe]

“We have two criteria that have to be reconciled. One is that Malia is allergic, so it has to be hypoallergenic. There are a number of breeds that are hypoallergenic. On the other hand, our preference would be to get a shelter dog, but, obviously, a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me. So — so whether we’re going to be able to balance those two things, I think, is a pressing issue on the Obama household.”

Quite a quandary