I must confess that until now the idea of Web 2.0 has left me cold.  (If Web 2.0 is an alien concept to you, as it was to me, you might like to know that according to Wikipedia ‘Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities…such as social-networking sites, videosharing sites, wikis, blogs…’).  Blogs I can see the point of – you choose to read the ones that mean something to you and comment if you feel you have something to add.

But my experiences just of book and film reviews on Amazon had led me to believe that the type of people with the time and inclination to share their opinions were precisely the type of people whose views I didn’t want to hear!  My response to those choosing to answer the Twitter question ‘What are you doing?’ is ‘So what and who cares?’  Unless you’re a celebrity with a devoted following, does anybody really want to know?

But I’ve just seen an inspiring film at www.usnowfilm.com about the possibilities created by sites where people who were previously strangers share information.  The examples I particularly liked were couchsurfing.com where travellers can find someone willing to put them up on the sofa for the night, and mumsnet.com where parents share the kind of information they apparently used to pick up from relatives and neighbours.  Now that bankers and MPs have shown themselves to be greedy and not particularly clever, could this kind of openness of information enable a more truly democratic society?

This is the key question debated in the film, which lasts for an hour and is the most heartening message I’ve heard in a long time. (Although I’m no more enthusiastic about going on Facebook…)