Wired on Friday: Last month the Grand Committee Room of the Houses of Parliament, on a hot Bastille Day, bore witness to perhaps the first time the Internet House of Commons met inside the real one, writes Mike Butcher.

For this was a meeting of "bloggers" - online diarists and commentators - at the seat of British political power. There were there to discuss how blogging could affect real-world politics.

Organised by online think-tank VoxPolitics.com, over 150 people crammed into the room by Westminster Hall, which itself has seen many historical events, including the trial of Charles 1st. Indeed, a small piece of history was made when a wireless Internet network was set up so that attendees could blog the event live online. Duly, laptops and iBooks with Wi-Fi connections were unfurled and the blogging began.

Blogs, or weblogs - the diary-style websites by private enthusiast writers and journalists - have emerged as the pre-eminent way of entering into a running online conversation with any constituency that is willing to read it. Weblogs and online communities based on this 'social software' have been this year's big news online. But if they are to affect anything, the true test would be their effect on real-world politics.

The discussion, Can Weblogs Change Politics? featured one of only two MPs blogging at the time - although two others have joined since. Tom Watson is Labour MP for West Bromwich East and the first MP blogger (tom-watson.co.uk). Six months ago he was a relative unknown. Today he is the top listing for Labour MP on Google.

Watson explained how his blog had helped connect him to constituents in a kind of ongoing online surgery. As the former owner of a "dreadful, static, vanity website," Watson found he got no feedback from constituents.

Parliament's first blogger is understandably optimistic: "I really think that once we reach a critical mass [of MPs using the internet], we're on the cusp of changing politicians to be more open."

Political columnist Stephen Pollard (Stephenpollard.net) spoke about how bloggers were starting to hold journalists to account by pulling apart and correcting their articles, virtually line by line - a process dubbed Fisking after American bloggers took the Independent's Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk, to task over his reporting of the Iraq war.

But those wondering if blogs will end up being online talking shops, where a lot of hot keyboards are worn out, make be speaking too soon. Businesses face the wrath of consumer-driven campaigns online, and in this fight blogs are a powerful weapon.

It is no coincidence that Watson is using his site as a campaigning tool in his fight to tackle supermarkets' use of surveilance tools, in particular radio-controlled smart tags which can photograph and track customers when they purchase certain items. Watson, via his blog, has tapped into the ability of hi-tech supporters to come up with arguments about this infringement of privacy.

If we are looking for signs that blogs are affecting the real world, they are already appearing across the pond.

American bloggers have already helped to alert the mainstream media to Senator Trent Lott's racist comments during a birthday bash, unseat the editor of the New York Times, and abroad, the Iraqi blogger Sallam Pax put a different perspective in the US-lead war.

In America, blogging politicians are slowly becoming common. Most notably, Democrat presidential candidate Howard Dean, governor of Vermont, startled observers when his blog, Deanforamerica.com helped raise him over $7 million in campaign funds - two-thirds coming via the Net and $1.7 million more than presumed front runner John Kerry.

Dean's pioneering use of his blog as a way of building his case for election and creating a rolling, permanent online political platform for supporters, is making waves. To date over 75,000 supporters have met each other locally, linking via Dean's blog to Meetup.com, another "social software" online application.

There are an estimated two million bloggers globally, and their numbers are set to swell as even AOL's 35 million global users are offered blogging tools in a few months time.

But not everyone believes blogs have a genuine part to play in the political future. Andrew Orlowski, a controversialist writer for TheRegister.co.uk expressed the view that "a few people staying indoors a bit longer, bashing away solipsisms at their expensive computers - does not make for a social revolution."

And while Tom Watson posts to his blog several times a day, for all its success Howard Dean's blog shows something of the limitations of modern politics.

Although Dean does write for the site, it is his political team who post most frequently. Click on the archive of Dean's posts and you'll find most of them are "thank yous" to supporters, and betray little insight into the candidate's experience of his own campaign.

When it comes to politics, it is perhaps the case that the more high-profile the blogger, the less transparent the blog. But then, the less powerful the blogger, the less they have to lose in telling their own story.

Mike Butcher edits mbites.com