Thanks to Shane R for an entertaining and provocative evening at The Telegraph yesterday evening.

The panel weren’t as evangelical about the influence of blogs as I’d thought they might be (with the exception of Mick Fealty who thinks we bloggers will have our day soon) and in some ways there was an air of pessimism about opportunities missed.

There’s also a great deal of frustration with the pace of the political parties in adapting and adopting Web 2.0.  But, if there are only 3-4,000 people reading political blogs in this country (or so Iain Dale said) then were I making investment decisions as a political party I too might wonder about catering for political junkies rather than some of the more traditional methods.

One final point.  As is perhaps inevitable the event was pretty white, middle class and male, which reflects lots of us who are into political blogging but not the communities we write about or our readers necessarily.