Le general elections 2013 have concluded and the results have enshrined a situation of ungovernability in Italy. In the House of Representatives, the Pd won in a photo finish but gets an absolute majority of seats thanks to the majority prize, while the Senate is split into three seemingly irreconcilable parties with the Pdl and the Five Star Movement splitting the stakes with the center-left.
Leaving aside policy considerations and inviting debate separately, in this blog I point out an interesting tool of Google to follow politics news and learn in real time about the latest developments on the formation of the new government and the negotiations to activate new alliances to ensure Italy’s governability. In this way, it will be possible to get timely information from various sources and be up-to-date.
These are. Google Politics and Elections, a service that was already active in thirteen nations including the United States, Germany, and France and that in Italy was implemented with the contribution of the La7 television network and the Turin-based newspaper La Stampa, which launched many initiatives during the last election campaign.
Google Politics and Elections is somewhere between a news aggregator and a social network. The goal is to fosterinteraction among users who are invited to send their hangouts (videos uploaded through their Google account) online and thus dialogue on relevant political issues. Voters also have the opportunity to contact politicians or their staff directly through the official Google + page.
The tool for following politics also allows users to view videos uploaded to La 7‘s Youtube channel, which are divided into four sections: protagonists, issues, live streams of La7 programs, and news from La7 News. A calendar, on the other hand, shows all the events on the agenda that have accompanied the campaign and continue beyond, both on television and live.
You can also view the latest news on politics taken from Google News and filtered by party and topic, for example, digital agenda, labor, or public administration. Instead, the part that was stormed by visitors last night was the one with live election resultsthat was automatically uploaded from the portal of the Ministry of Interior. Here you can also circumscribe the data into regions, constituencies and provinces to see, also graphically thanks to a colored map, the distribution of votes to parties in different regions.
Thus, in the 2013 elections, Google experimented for the first time in Italy with a service that, as is the case, for example, in the United States, will be used primarily by information workers or stakeholders even after the elections. But the most malignant say that, given the current situation of ungovernability, the tool for viewing results will have to be reset and restarted very soon.
