• Italy | Leading by (virtual?) numbers
  Earlier this week a press release stated that Puglia governor Nichi Vendola passed Prime Minister Berlusconi on Facebook: one of the possible and most discussed competitors of Berlusconi, Vendola has now almost 240.000 fans, 13.000 more than the PM and it's third among political leaders in Europe (after Downing Street and London Mayor Boris Johnson).

Post invitado de Javier Pereira (jpereira001@gmail.com)

Hace sólo unos días, Jenna Dawn y Laura Gómez, dos portavoces oficiales de Twitter, se mostraron “encantadas” con la participación reciente de presidentes y jefes de Estado de América Latina en la red de microblogging, por el dinamismo que le imprimen a su plataforma. “La incursión de líderes políticos y presidentes, en general, están generando mucho movimiento; así que nos alegra que personajes como el presidente Hugo Chávez utilicen nuestra red”, dijo Dawn durante un evento en Ciudad de México.

• EU | Should bloggers get accreditation to EU institutions?
  Last March, the International Press Association expressed concern about the shrinking presence of European media in Brussels: it's recent news that there are now only 752 journalists with accreditation compared with 1,300 back in 2005. This created a debate on whether the accreditations should be extended to eurobloggers, lots of whom are already covering EU issues with competence, but lack access to documents and databases.
  Has the "eternal" question "bloggers VS. journalists" made it to the EU institutions, too? The situation might be a little different.

Earlier today I published a story on Andrew Stott as the new director of digital engagement in the British government. Later I recognized it was a story from 2009. I deeply apologize to PDF readers for my mistake.

• UK | Introducing Andrew Stott, first Digital Engagement czar
  The U.K. government has hired Andrew Stott as "director of digital engagement" to push its plan to move more public services online and to pursue a better use of digital technologies to engage with citizens.
  Stott will be responsible for implementing the Power of Information Taskforce recommendations:

• Germany | From Minister Aigner to Mark Zuckerberg: the importance of privacy
  German Consumer Protection Minister Ilse Aigner has written an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, expressing her concerns about Facebook’s plans to further relax data protection regulations:

• UK | Twitter: a new prediction system for elections?
  During the UK electoral campaign Tweetminster conducted a Twitter-based word of mouth experiment : they tracked the most mentioned constituencies and candidates and tried to map the correlation between buzz, word-of-mouth and the eventual election results through a predictive mode (here you can read more about initial findngs and methodology).
  The results?

• UK | Follow the UK election online (while waiting for official results)
  All over Europe today it's all about UK general election. Results show a victory of the Conservatives but without a majority - so, pointing to a hung Parliament. Oh, and the Greens get their first seat ever getting their leader Caroline Lucas (also on Twitter) elected in Brighton.
  
  (BBC' homepage at 10.15)

• UK | Final TV debate: a Twitter analysis
  Linguamatics and NPCU provided an insight of viewer sentiment based on tweet analysis:

  Top issues for the twitterers in the third debate (Figure 3 below) were immigration, banking, economy and tax. Clegg and Brown shared the lead on immigration, Clegg was ahead on banking and tax, whilst Brown clearly won on the economy. The fact that Camercon didn't win any issues of policy substance, but nevertheless improved his performance, suggested viewers are not assessing the leaders on policy specifics - hardly a revelation of course.

• UK | The British are invading (Twitter)!
  Last week British EU geeks got excited by the UK debate when the three candidates dealt with EU and foreign affairs. Quite surprisingly, the debate had a huge impact on Twitter (hashtag: #leadersdebate), also extensively used by the eurobloggers.
  Joe Litobarski watched the debate and has a detailed summary of the night - and a critical take: "There was a lot of build-up to the second TV live debate for other reasons. Jason O’Mahoney points out that the Liberal Democrats had done so well in the first debate that they now had a lot to lose.

• UK| Has Twitter claimed its first political scalp?
  It seems so after the news that Stuart MacClennan, a Scottish Labour candidate, has been sacked by his own party because of offensive comments expressed via Twitter. On Twitter MacClennan, a young Constitutional affairs researcher, has cursed leading politicians, described pensioners as "coffin dodgers" and made remarks on slavery that has been defined from "unfortunate" to "racist: an apology wasn't enough to save him form firing. On the Guardian Simon Jeffery has a point: