Once Britons wanting to vent their political spleen either had to write to the Times or take their soapbox to Speakers Corner in London's Hyde Park for a rant.
Now they can blog.
The campaign for tomorrow's election has witnessed an explosion of web logs - "blogs" - from candidates to journalists and political snipers tearing chunks out of the bombast pouring out of party media machines.
"I think this is probably the most interesting phenomenon of this election," said Stephen Coleman of the Oxford Internet Institute.
"This is a low level form of entry into politics," he said. "The key thing about blogs is that they are grass roots and somewhat subterranean.
"The party websites are extremely technocratic and centralised. The blogs are more what people were hoping would come out of the internet."
The main topics are those that have dominated what has universally been dubbed a dull campaign - immigration, education, the economy, crime, taxation, the Iraq invasion and above all whether any politicians can be trusted. All the parties come in for criticism, from Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour and the opposition Conservatives - "Tories" as they are often called - to the anti-war Liberal Democrats.
"It's a pity that the Tories and Lib Dems are adopting the approach of calling the Prime Minister a liar... The words 'pot calling the kettle black' spring to mind," said one message.
The blogs will not have any impact on the outcome of the election, in which Labour is set to win an unprecedented third consecutive term. But politicians might be well advised to pay them heed.
"The classic bloggers are internet savvy," Mr Coleman said. "They are young. They are mainly male. But they are not hugely disenfranchised. Most of them are quite articulate people.
"Most are fairly non-partisan," he added. "It is almost a given amongst bloggers that they don't like the (Conservatives) but it is also pretty given that they don't like Mr Blair either.
"So they are pretty disengaged from the tribal aspects of politics."
The blogs range from discussions on tactical voting to simple rants about politicians only being interested in themselves
One that caused the biggest stir was a spoof blog of Mr Blair's Machiavellian media manipulator and election strategist Alastair Campbell which was actually written by a 30-year-old woman working in the marketing department of an online bookmaker. Bloggers are split broadly into two camps - those taking themselves seriously and those poking fun at the whole process.
The former tend to be populated by parties and candidates as well as reporters and analysts, leaving the latter mainly to the sceptics, satirists and disgruntled - of which there are many.