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Cameron spoke in a adapted farm building and received polite applause. There was no razzmatazz. The setting could hardly have been added traditional as David Cameron launched the Conservative party’s acclamation campaign yesterday in a quiet corner of rural Oxfordshire. A small audience of Tory supporters had gathered at Sansomes Farm Studios, the home of the Oxford School of Drama. “It was a bit like a constituency event,” said an aide.

Film was prepared for YouTube. “We can just columnist the right buttons and people apperceive within seconds,” said a member of the Cameron team. Back in London, however, Cameron’s “new media” team was at work, alerting tens of thousands of followers through instant updates on Facebook and Twitter, giving them an internet link to the full speech so they could download it on their laptops, BlackBerrys or adaptable phones. The day’s main TV news bulletins were hours away but the key messages “we can’t go on like this” and “this is the year for change” were out. Political bloggers were briefed before they poured their instant assay on to the web. Campaign 2010 was under way.

Facebook was largely exceptional of and Twitter had yet to be invented. YouTube had been in existence for only three months. Blogs were in their infancy and political bloggers, now hugely influential in the flow of news, had yet to evolve. All parties acclimated email, but beyond that the internet remained undeveloped as a campaigning tool. At the last election, in May 2005, amusing networking sites were known to few.

Election 2010 will show how much the apple has afflicted and how affected acclamation outcomes now are to the unpredictability of events online. As Cameron’s speech yesterday, and Gordon Brown article’s in this paper today demonstrate, many of the issues at its heart will be familiar: the economy, schools, hospitals and crime. But the ways the main parties use technology to get their messages across to the widest possible audiences will be unrecognisable .

This time the party that really masters new media could have the decisive edge.”. Matthew McGregor, who runs the London appointment of Blue State Digital, the online campaign consultancy close which provided the technology that powered the Obama campaign, says the party that wins will be the one that learns most from the Democrats’ success. “With the acclamation narrowing, this acclamation looks increasingly tight,” he says. “The new media campaigns really matter because every single vote matters.

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