There is no doubt that the political parties in the U.S. are doing everything they can to embrace both new and existing modes of communications, from using twitter to update followers to text messages for news, to rich campaign web sites and sophisticated online truth squads. From an existing media standpoint, the GOP has deployed a state of the art facility in Denver to inject their POV into the new cycles; the Democratic party is expected to do the same thing. What's most interesting for me is less the "how" and more the "who" that's communicating. The true value proposition of all this technology is that it reduces the barrier to entry, and allows for the production and discovery of a variety of voices.
For the last few days, anyone who tracks Dave Winer has been treated to his journey from the Bay Area to the Denver to "cover" the convention, if such a word is actually appropriate. And as he notes in a recent post, the difference between his tools and those of the NYT are essentially zero.
One would hope (and I certainly did at one time) that this proliferation of voices would actually add up to a more reasoned debate that illuminated more than if burned. Alas, as local columnist Danny Westneat noted today, that dream seems to have died an early death.