As I was taking our cat, Ubi, to the vet this afternoon, I turned on the radio to NPR and there was a fascinating discussion on Talk of the Nation about the web’s role in the presidential debate. It was called Digital Democracy: YouTube’s Presidential Debates and you can listen to a podcast of it on that site. It is very well worth listening to. It is about what role Web2.0 tools such as YouTube, MySpace, blogs, web searches, etc. will play in politics, both in the upcoming presidential debate and in politics in general. Here is the NPR Blog of the Nation post entitled Democrawikiyoutubia 2.8 that is about this NPR broadcast.
As you may or may not know, CNN is asking people to submit YouTube videos with a question for the presidential campaign debate that will be taking place next Monday, July 23. Here is where you can submit your video. And here is a Washington Post blog post entitled CNN/YouTube Debate: The Best of The Questions So Far that has videos of some of the best questions that have been submitted so far. There are also many interested comments for this article.
Another interesting fact is that much of this information is in blog format, such as the NPR Blog of the Nation, The Washington Post’s Blog and the Official Google Blog post where the YouTube Presidential Debate program was introduced. YouTube also has a You Choose ’08 channel for the 2008 presidential campaign.
And after listening to this broadcast and reading the associated articles and blogs, I realized just how much Web 2.0 is permeating our culture in every way. Yes Virginia, there is Politics 2.0.
~Susie
All Things Web 2.0 
July 20, 2007 at 6:31 pm
My friend and I are almost three weeks into the launch of our Republican 2.0 site, which we hope will attract all Digg and Reddit users that have had enough of conservative, or even slightly right-leaning news sources being totally suppressed. Reddit in particular advocates the suppression of any perceived pro-Bush, or pro-GOP stories, so there is really no benefit for conservative or Republican users of these sites. You are welcome to contact me at 847-791-1065 if you had any questions, or were interested in profiling the site. It is the first conservative 2.0 project on the internet and we hope to generate a lot of buzz in the next couple months. Thanks for your time and I hope to hear from you.