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The government have agreed to legalise product placement in the UK and the final legislation is in the process of being ratified by the government.

There are a lot of exemptions and conditions to this and no placement can be broadcast until Ofcom has run a public consultation on the detailed changes to its code (which the government predicts this will be later this year). Here is the latest information from the Ministerial Statement published in February:

Last Thursday saw the first ever live televised leader's debate on ITV1. The first of three broadcasts saw David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown put under the spotlight for 90 minutes, uninterrupted, with no advert breaks. In what should have been a testing environment for all three leaders, the programme  was in fact damp, sterile and almost what seemed like rehearsed, with some 76 rules covering areas like audience participation and 90 second introductions from each leader.

Independent News & Media have confirmed the sale of the Independent, the Independent on Sunday and its associated websites to Russian Alexander Lebedev. The Independent will be the second British newspaper purchase for Lebedev who bought the London Evening Standard in January 2009.

So Twitter has finally announced they were going to try and monetize their site. Their idea? To offer featured tweets for money – but is it going to work…?

Satisfaction with family life is high and despite views to the contrary (a quarter of all children live in single parent families compared to 8% in 1972 source Mintel) there seems to be a growing trend for togetherness. According to TGI 85% of adults enjoy spending time with their family. This togetherness is also supported by an article in the Daily Mail yesterday, saying of retired homeowners 65+ withdrew an average of £43,090 from their homes between January and March 2010–a third took out the money to help their family (compared with less than a fifth at the same time in 2009)

Facebook, the social networking juggernaut has now grown into a significant traffic source. The meteoric rise of the website is no secret – Facebook is already the most popular social networking website in the world, leaving competitors MySpace and Orkut far, far behind. The website is the number one traffic driver to news sources. However, Facebook is now also strategically poised to become a major Internet hub of the likes of Google and Yahoo.

An interesting report from Tamar hit the sport/business headlines this week, suggesting that World Cup sponsors are not adequately using search to leverage their sponsorship campaigns.

Twitter, like many things online, falls victim to spammers. These are people who will aggressively follow and unfollow people to try and build up their own follower number so when they send out their spammy twitter update it reaches as many people as possible.

Sadly, these updates can range from irritating messages to those with links which point to harmful phishing or malware websites.

With the countdown to the General Election now officially underway, every polling company in the land are releasing daily updates of their predictions, with current opinion ranging from a conservative majority to a Labour minority government, with plenty of talk of a hung parliament thrown in to the mix. Inspired by Hitwise’s Bill Tancer’s excellent book Click, we wanted to see what online behaviour could tell us about likely voting results – perhaps we could pick a winner with some good old search data and buzz monitoring.

Earlier this week MEC Manchester became the first media agency as a whole to ever take part in SDI training. What is SDI training you ask?