Was Le Web 3 the start of Politics 2.0 ?

I didn't go to Le Web 3 (fortunately it seems), but I've been catching up on my blog reading this evening (sad, I know - but its better than TV) and one can hardly miss the hullabaloo....but I'm not so much interested in what happened, but why it happened at all.

Seems to me that something novel occurred here....Old Time Politics hit the newest New Media, and - for once in these days of spin - the vox populi got out, in two ways.

(i) The context got commented on (and has it ever - just hit technorati for LeWeb3)

(ii) In (far fewer) posts, the content was commented on.

My takeaway - three things happen if blogging starts to occur in an audience - essentialy the Politico is speaking to a far larger (and less manageable) set of channels, so:

(i) "Spin" is going to be far harder from now on when politicians are operating live.

(ii) "Broadscasting", "Soundbiting etc " as a speaker is going to be harder - bloggers will expect to engage and be engaged

(iii) The net has a long memory....the stuff will be out there, searchable by all, not in a newspaper / TV station's closed database

There has been a recent parallel - the Walmart / Edelman thing - lesson I took from that is that in the blogosphere, because the comms is more many to many, spin gets found out far faster.

I suspect that the initial reaction of Politicians will be to go for more managed / controllable events, but that some ambitious / savvy ones will then master the new medium and start to make headway, which will force the rest to comunicate.

Could it be that the ability to read the conversation, and enter if it you felt inclined, will make people feel that they were again somehow engaged in the decision making, that they had a voice? This is a small step but it seems to me a useful step, towards greater inclusion.

My real hope is that it will rejuvenate the democratic process...for too many years the "didn't bother to vote" constituency has been far too large (imho) to comfortably call many OECD countries' governments "democratically elected".

No doubt any embryo system will be gamed, and played to death by sophisticated PR agencies...but if enough channels exist, the truth - or at least a less spun news - will out.

If you think of one or two of the crazier decisions taken in recent years, it is interesting to imagine how it would have turned out if a nation was chattering about them, onlien, and everyone could see what others were really thinking.

This way there would be much less chance of fooling all of the people, all of the time.