Apart from anything else, the DNC 08 will be remembered for how political conferences will from now on be covered; it will be the first true cyber-convention, a blogger's heaven.

As well as the 15,000 accredited journalists, there will be thousands more unaccredited. The blogoshpere will never have witnessed so much political traffic.

Google, the internet giant, has set up a huge parallel convention site next to the Pepsi Center called the Big Tent for those not lucky enough to be accredited. For £50, journalists and bloggers get wi-fi plus food and drink for the entire length of the convention. A kiosk has been set up so people can upload videos on to YouTube, owned by Google.

MySpace, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, plans a number of events around the convention, including MySpace cafes where people can go online and chitchat about what's happening in the main forum. Barack Obama has nearly 500,000 friends on MySpace.

Online news sites like Politico, which did not exist four years ago, will have 40 journalists at the DNC. Another prominent internet news outlet, the Huffington Post, apart from its usual web service, will also be providing its own "Oasis" next to the Big Tent where people can unwind with smoothies and massages.

The DNC HQ itself boasts that its gathering by the Rocky Mountains will be "technologically savvy". As well as the first live high definition "gavel-to-gavel" convention proceedings via DemConvention.com, there will be more than 120 credentialed blogs - a record for a national political convention, boast the party chiefs, and more than three times the number of blogs at the 2004 convention.

There will also be the first Spanish language simulcast, again available online, to cater for the 35million-plus Americans whose first language is Spanish.

There will be a series of daily webcasts by campaign and convention insiders with each show providing behind-the-scenes information not available anywhere else.

At the weekend, Obama used text messaging to alert his party's supporters as to who his running mate would be. On the night of his big set-piece speech on Thursday, when accepting the nomination Obama will ask the 75,000 audience to use their mobile phones simultaneously to tell friends to tune in to watch his speech.

While Obama and the Democrats have embraced the new technology, the Republicans and their choice John McCain, in particular, appear to be lagging behind a little. While the party uses the web to churn out its message just like the Democrats, it does not use text messaging. Meantime, the 72-year-old McCain is said to use the internet rarely.

If the web does have an influence on how Americans view the race to the White House, it seems Obama and the Democrats could already have a head start.