Itching for statistics, insights and data on the use of second life for political and educational purposes - who are the people who tune in? probably the usual suspects - but what do they think about the whole process? is the technology living up to their expectations? are these online forums a valuable form of [...]

A first hand view on e-democracy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9RqHEAxN9g

A forthcoming book ‘The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy’ by Andrew Keen is questioning the euphoria which is surrounding Web 2.0 and user-generated content online from blogs to social networking sites to Wikipedia and citizen journalism. Keen questions current online contents and practices highlighting how [...]

There is lots of talk about how the Internet and new media are transforming political communication and the political process – however, little talk about another major issue related to this: what are the best research methods to go about studying these changes? Are ‘traditional’ methods from survey analysis of users to content analysis of [...]

Italian politician Antonio di Pietro sets the trend again - today he has announced his party Italia dei Valori has opened a space in Second Life. It’d be interesting to study the impact (if any?) of this move.

The news of Italian PM Romano Prodi’s resignation and the government crisis in Italy following yesterday’s Senate’s vote on foreign policy has had great resonance on the Web both among citizens and party officials. Thousands of angry citizens have turned to the Web to express their discontent with the two dissidents from the extreme Left [...]

In yesterday’s weekly seminar at the Annenberg Center for Communication, Prof. Jay T. Harris, Chair in Journalism and Democracy at USC, raised several points of interest on the current crises of journalism and the future of news. He illustrated how the digitization of news, the new devices and the new patterns of information acquisition have [...]

Italian Minister Antonio Di Pietro from the left-coalition party ‘Italia dei Valori’ is the first Italian politician to make use of YouTube as a tool for political communication. He has posted a video where he reports on this week’s Council of Ministers’ session, and announces this vlog will be followed by weekly posts “in order [...]