This year’s elections in Germany will also make use of social media tools. Unlike the US presidential elections, I do not expect they will be much affected — with one exception:

The newly founded HSP (Horst Schlämmer Partei) is betting big time through using social media. On its campaign website you can see that they are present on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, StudiVZ, have newsletters, a blog, its podcast is number one in the iTunes store already, and much more. It looks almost as if they are making fun of social media tools, too, having just about any social network embedded code for copy available.

Watch the campaign video, I like most where he shows his plan in a live TV show.

Today I used the blog trend tool IceRocket to compare the number of blog posts on “LTE” in the last three months of the leading wireless infrastructure vendors with each other. Not surprisingly Ericsson (39%) showed up on top, followed by Alcatel Lucent (24%) quite far behind, then Nokia Siemens Networks (16%) and the two Chinese manufacturers Huawei (12%) and ZTE (9%).

The tool gives a first hint of who might be leading the discussions in certain areas although to be able to understand more one would have to actually study the blog posts daily over a certain period of time. GoogleAlerts is the well known tool to do that and there are quite a few others as well. We will show some of these social media “listening tools” in a wiki soon. So check back here and you will learn about that too. What does WolframAlpha got to say about this I asked myself then too, and the answer was:

Prime factorization: