There is now no doubt that we are in the early part of a massive shift in the culture of Australia.

We are about to become a fully integrated YouTube society.

For a lot of people this will not be apparent for possibly several years. By that time the momentum will be sufficient that many marketers and PR people will not be able to get their clients and employers onto the bandwagon.

The amazing thing is that this revolution is being led by the mainstream political parties in Australia. First the Liberals with 4 major policy statements being announced by our Prime Minister, John Howard, on YouTube.

Then, the launch yesterday of the Kevin07 website. Laden with video - that is also on YouTube - it, together with the PM, is setting the pace for communications this spring in Australia as we head into a Federal Election.

At the same time there are new websites in the process of coming onstream like www.federalelection.com.au. The goal of this one is to provide the total forum for debate in the coming months. A site where all parties and candidates can be presented side by side. Great idea. Not sure if they are going to be able to make it the commercially viable success they would like as rapidly as they would like. We shall see.

What I find amazing is that this sea change to our culture. Because this is as big as when TV became the debating platform in the US. And Richard Nixon became 'Tricky Dicky' because under the powerful TV lights his 12 0'clock shadow made it look like he wasn't clean. Or prior to that when Eisenhower used TV to advertise in his presidential campaign. These were firsts.

Now in Australia we will have the first true YouTube election anywhere in the world. It stands to be a bell weather that campaigners in the US and UK will watch and use to avoid mistakes. And it should also set some examples for how we can expect corporations to get their marketing messages through to us in coming years.

(By the way, at Vquence we are starting to realize that the tools that we have been developing that enable us to rapidly crawl video hosting sites and monitor changes in near real time also provide us with a huge amount of raw data that can be massively valuable to companies that want to play in this space.)