The fact that several U.S. presidential hopefuls have announced their intensions first on their Web sites (wave, Hillary!) showing the growing importance of the medium in U.S. politics, claims this BBC story.

The story opens by talking about the famous (well, in some circles) YouTube attack ad aimed at Hillary Clinton, riffing off the old Macintosh/'1984' commercial.

An excerpt:

Jeff Jarvis, a media professor at the City University of New York, blogs at Prezvid.com, a site monitoring candidates' use of video on the web.

He said: "The Hillary ad was made by an anonymous political operative. That is a bit troubling, but - hey - it's the open world now and anyone can get their message to the world.

Campaign websites have grown more sophisticated over the years

"You can make commercials. I can make commercials. We can all get our message out in ways we couldn't before. And I genuinely celebrate that in a democracy."

It is a democracy that is changing the way it presents itself.

Andrew Rasiej set up the website techpresident.com to monitor how the presidential candidates are using the web.

"Most political campaigns create a message and then expect the traditional media to distribute that message. They hope it doesn't get skewed too much," he said.

"Now, though, voters are either collecting the message on their own and reinterpreting it or distributing it on behalf of the campaigns. Or producing their own message in reaction to the campaigns. It's a very different environment."

The article goes on to ask what I think is a very salient question.

... One criticism US web watchers make of all the campaigns - even those such as Barack Obama's and John Edwards's which seem, especially in fund-raising terms, successfully to be tapping into the web's energy: at the moment, they seem to be lacking the element of genuine interactivity.

Joe Biden has urged voters to send him questions via his website

Prezvid.com's Jeff Jarvis is one of those who makes the comparison with UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron's webcameron blog.

It has been much lampooned, for its images of Mr Cameron at home, fighting for air time with his children.

But Mr Jarvis sees it is as a genuine forum for citizen politics, one that gives members of the public a chance to question a political leader on the issues of the day.

Mr Jarvis has been encouraging voters to send in questions to America's presidential contenders via the internet and acknowledges that some of the candidates - such as Democratic Senator Joe Biden - have been taking steps to elicit them as well.

Yet he acknowledges that while the net has growing influence, turning a 24-hour news cycle into a 15-minute one, not every candidate will benefit from it to the same degree.

"On his web site, John McCain asked people to send in questions via YouTube," he said. "But the last time I looked, no-one had."