With an intent of warming you up a bit in this yet another week of the impossibly drawn-out winter, we ventured to find a truly hot place in the ice-ridden and thickly snowed Europe, where the atmosphere has not frozen like the Baltic Sea. The quest wasn’t too difficult. This winter’s highest temperatures and hottest emotions radiated from Ukraine due to the presidential campaign. Apart from Ukrainians themselves, the elections electrified the country’s neighbouring nations and numerous media. We probed into the online news services available on the Ukrainian internet to take a close look at the mirror in which the political views of e-Ukrainians reflect on a daily basis. Notably, nearly 8 million citizens of this country are known to be internet users.

Dear Reader. Try to picture your usual day. You wake up early morning and turn on the radio. The people behind the broadcast already know you crave for the latest news. They also know you’re not quite awake yet and you need a jolt of energy. You will not be surprised to hear a super strong coffee commercial among a bunch of invigorating songs – this will be your first buy in the shop round the corner. At around 10, while slaving away at your school or office, you begin to feel a bit peckish. What you now need is a snack, especially that it is also a perfect occasion to take a small break. You will have a breakfast wafer advertised as THE choice of the entire country’s population at this particular time. A few hours later you are back at home. No sooner do you find some time to have your well–deserved rest than about 6 pm. Perfectly aware of that fact, your TV station broadcasts its best programmes and most expensive ads around this hour. Just before you go to bed, you will check your mail and weather forecast. It says it will be a rainy day tomorrow, which reminds you of the vitamins you must buy. You have not decided which brand of pills you will go for, but once in the pharmacy, you will surely recognize the packaging you’ve seen in the sponsor’s advert. Incidentally, there’s a letter in your mailbox informing you of a new price offer for this product.

Internet cafes. A thing of the past or still alive and well? Concerned with website rankings, amounts spent on online advertising and speed of connections, we tend to forget how much they can tell us about the nature and health of the internet market. And what exactly do they say? It’s investigation time!

Better late than… later. This is how you could briefly comment on the last results attained by facebook.com in Poland. Six years after its premiere, the global leader of social networking is beginning to win the hearts of Polish internet users. Interestingly, the rise in its popularity coincides with the first ever recorded drop in the reach of nasza-klasa.pl – a titan overshadowing all other social platforms operating in Poland. Coincidence or a prelude to an epic duel between David and Goliath? Certainly an issue worth pondering.