During the last weekend I was involved in a very interesting initiative organized by Libero, one of the major Italian portals, and SWG, a company specialized in polls and market research. During the election days Libero and SWG run an on-line exit poll, trying to demostrate that you can gather enough data on-line to predict the whole population trends (of course, applying advanced statistical techniques).

To document this experiment they invited five bloggers to SWG offices, to let them tell the story. Both the president and the ceo of the company spent two days with us, explaining their work, describing what was going on and answering to our many questions. We had good wifi, water, coffee, pizza and plenty of information.

So we told our story on our blog and Libero used some of our posts on their main portal. At 3pm on Monday, when the polls were officially closed and we were allowed to disclose exit poll data I had the all-time traffic peak. For a few minutes mainstream media sites went down overwhelmed by the huge number of users trying to figure out if Berlusconi was still our prime minister.

Libero and SWG had been quite happy with the blogging experiment: we were able to tell the story and to answer to many question from our readers in a fresh, "un-pr" way. The statistical side of the experiment was partially unsuccessful: while the forecasts based on on-line submission was quite comparable with the ones based on traditional methods, giving a 5% lead to the left-wing, real voters gave an amazingly close 0.07% lead to the Left, giving us our little Florida moments.