I've been off with the H1N1 virus.  If anyone fancies catching it I can courier over bags of "air" at a small charge...

I can highly recommend Osteria Dell’Angelo.  Brilliant from the opening buonjourno to the closing prego.  I was in there with a certain PA institution and in the course of our lunch we chatted to a SpAd and waved hello to half the Times’ political correspondents.  Well worth a visit.

Anyway we gassed – interesting chat.  The thorny topic of the future of the APPC struck me as a pretty important issue for the next few months.  With Tom Watson’s departure there is a real sense that the move towards any further regulation of public affairs consultants is dead in the water, at least until after the next election. But there is still confusion about the issue.  As you’ll recall a working party was formed earlier in the year to look at a move towards an umbrella body – a Public Affairs Council.  

But that was then – now with Tom, who was a driver for change, on the backbenchers thoughts are turning towards the approach the Conservatives might take.  The institution was convinced that the industry was likely to come under severe scrutiny and that change on the regulatory front was likely.

We’re supposed to be heading for summer, but it was winter in some pockets of Westminster yesterday.  A hard frost in some of the Palace’s meeting rooms yesterday bodes ill for the party over the coming months.

Firstly at the Progress event with Stephen Byers and Ben Bradshaw I witnessed a room split down the middle on Brown’s leadership.  Applause for Byers.  Applause for Bradshaw.  Arms folded.  Heads being gently shaken depending on the point of view. We are witnessing the development of a joint narrative within the Labour Party membership, with loyalty or radical shakeup as the increasingly divergent themes.

The other interesting point is that over the last couple of weeks commentators from the left of the party have started to cleave hard to the leadership.  This, to me at least, seems quite unusual.  Both Brown and Blair have had desperate struggles with the Left throughout their years in office.  But now people like Ken Livingstone and Jon Cruddas are fiercely fighting Gordon’s corner.

Why would that be?  Someone suggested last night that the left is preparing for a takeover of the party in opposition, and does not want an injection of new leadership to rock the boat. Or the left might just be more loyal... I don't know.

Whatever the case may be Labour moved beyond the leadership debate last night.  The election will not be in October but in eleven months time.

Can I point you in the direction of the fabulous Luke Akehurst's blog today?  Brilliant!   Get well soon Luke.

One thing I think it's hard to do with social media users is to attempt to tell them that white is black or black is white.  To misquote a great sage (you read blogs so you know who) this almost always ends up with someone getting killed on the next zebra crossing.

Recent start up, Social Media Library, have ventured to cross this most dangerous of roads in their publication Politics Online 2009, summarised in this article, and come a bit of a cropper.  There are quite a few factual inaccuracies in there which are well documented by Stuart Bruce, Simon Collister, on Labour Home and even Guido himself.

Social Media Library is struggling to make sense of a hugely complex universe where size really doesn't matter, and that's the problem.   What SML have come up with is a measurement system which takes into account hits on a blog, as well as activity on that site for the first hour after posting.  That inevitably means that longer term bloggers like Guido score much more activity, because they've got the longevity and the user base.

Therefore, unless I got completely the wrong end of the stick during their pitch, there is a certain inevitability about these results.