I hope you’ve been following the coverage of the World Economic Forum from Davos. It’s been gripping stuff. There have been political tantrums and walk outs, heated arguments and wild promises. Exciting political and economic debate conducted in the rarified atmosphere of the Swiss Alps. Selected bits of the WEF meetings have always been open to the public. That’s why political heavyweights like Bono, Sharon Stone and Brad Pitt occasionally sashay into town. But this year the Forum took citizen participation a stage further.

If you were prowling the internet in the run up to the Forum, you may have noticed a competition taking place on YouTube and MySpace. By posting a video addressing one of the Forum’s concerns, you could have won a place at the Davos meeting. In other words, with a video camera, an internet connection and something to say, you could participate in the debate along with the likes of Gordon Brown, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Shimon Peres and a host of other luminaries. A brilliant idea.

Sadly, my own entry was deemed unsuitable as it involved saving the planet by throwing Bono into landfill. Rebecca McQuigg from Los Angeles and Pablo Camacho from Bogatá took it more seriously and won against competition from around 400 entries. You can still catch their reports on YouTube and MySpace.

By coincidence, as the Forum wrapped up last Sunday, a bunch of Radio 4 rent-a-pundits were bemoaning new technology. Kids, they claimed, were spending too long with their gadgets and losing the ability to communicate. Maybe these grumpy old persons should stay in more and look around the internet. The young and geeky have a wider perspective and those Sunday media experts should start scanning the skies for the arrival of an imminent asteroid.

MySpace is four years old and YouTube is six. They’re bringing together people from all over the globe in ways most people wouldn’t have imagined ten years ago. (Science fiction readers knew it all along, of course.) It’s not all idealistic - competitions like this generate a ton of free publicity for MySpace and YouTube. But citizens of the world wide web have found a voice and some of their messages are going to stick.

It’s a positive sign and we should celebrate it.

Meanwhile, I hope Rebecca and Pablo got some skiing in.