We were pleasantly surprised last month when C-SPAN launched an innovative website for covering the Democratic and Republican conventions. Today, as the nation prepares for the first Presidential Debate, the cable network is launching an even more impressive effort with a number of interactive features for keeping up with the proceedings as they happen and analyzing them after the fact.

Named Debate Hub, the site includes the same TwitterTwitter integration as the Convention Hub site that C-SPAN launched last month, which, like Twitter’s own election site, cascades real-time updates of what people are saying about debate topics. Debate Hub also archives all of the Tweets and tracks the most active users.

Beyond the Twitter integration though, C-SPAN has created multiple ways to sort through video from the debate, which will run on about a 10-minute delay from what’s happening live. The first feature is the Debate Timeline, which allows you to navigate through the debate chronologically and see which issues are being discussed at what times and who is talking. In a demo this morning, the site was filled with content from the Kerry/Bush debates from ’04, so, for example, you could jump to six minutes in and see video of both Bush and Kerry responding to questions from Jim Lehrer about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. All videos can be embedded elsewhere.

Moving on, Debate Hub also features a word tree, allowing you to click on specific keywords that were mentioned during the debate, and then filter by candidate. For example, click on “nuclear” and you will see the 14 times that the word was mentioned during the first Kerry/Bush debate, and then be able to watch the video from that segment of the debate. While watching the video, you can also pull up the text transcript from the segment to follow along.

Finally, the C-SPAN site also pulls in blog and mainstream coverage from dozens of sources from all sides of the political spectrum. You can either opt to view all posts as they come in, or filter to a specific site if you’d prefer to see posts from only one source.

Debate Hub is expected to go live today sometime after 1PM ET, with the debate starting at 9PM ET tonight.