One of the more interesting articles I've read recently is the reflection of a French Internet community leader on his role in the Nicolas Sarkozy presidential campaign. Loic LeMeur is one of the founders of the LeWeb3 who decided to invite the three leading candidates for the French presidency to his annual blogging conference that took place last December. Two of the candidates showed up, including Nicolas Sarkozy the eventual winner of the election.

The Sarkozy campaign subsequently asked Loic to join the campaign as one of their advisors on relating to the Internet culture. He said:

Sarkozy's team contacted me and offered me to become an advisor on Internet topics, I gladly accepted to participate in an Internet committee every week, a couple of hours, but that was all, I did not even take any membership in the party, and this is still the case today.

What's interesting about this article is the way the Sarkozy campaign ended up using the Internet to engage younger French voters. The effort included:

• taking questions from instant messaging and "live bloggers" during campaign television broadcasts, and having Sarkozy respond to the questions in real time, and
• creating an island called I'lle Sarkozy on Second Life which was enhabited by volunteers who reportedly survived attacks from virtual political opponents.

There was some Internet outreach in the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, but nothing like this. Is this the sort of thing that we will see take place in this country in 2008? [ via VoIP Watch ]