THERE were people walking around in hats fashioned out of tin foil in Las Vegas over the weekend, the fruits of a workshop on the media at an inaugural annual convention of liberal internet bloggers.

“It’s to stop THEM from frying our brains,” said Lisa Schiff, who writes a regular blog — or web log — under the name of “Crkrjx”. She explained that the tin foil helmets were an “elaborate joke on the much-despised mainstream media”. She said: “Everyone thinks that because we are on the Left we must be conspiracy theorists, even though we have some pretty good ideas.

“I mean,” she added with a sly smile, “look at my hat. I’ve given it a receptor aerial so that it can pick up the truth.”

The Yearly Kos convention is the most formal manifestation yet of what organisers hope will be a burgeoning political movement similarly seeking to harness technology for a higher purpose.

It is named after the Daily Kos website, which has a readership of no fewer than 600,000, including many of those who almost propelled Howard Dean to the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004: an angry grassroots — or “netroots” — forged through hatred of President Bush, fury over the Iraq war and contempt for the Democrat leadership.

The Daily Kos takes its name from the last syllable of the first name of its fresh-faced founder, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, 34. It is an interactive site that allows all members to maintain blogs within the site. Although parts may be easy to dismiss as flakey or even freaky, the so-called “blogosphere” has undoubtedly become both a phenomenon and a force. This is why a clutch of potential Democratic presidential candidates and other senior party figures turned up at the Riveria Hotel for the 1,000-strong convention, all of them bending over backwards to show how seriously they were taking proceedings.

They included two state governors, Tom Vilsack, of Iowa, and Bill Richardson, of New Mexico, as well as Wesley Clark, the retired Army general who ran for the White House in 2004, and Harry Reid, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate.

But leading the pack was Mark Warner, the former Governor of Virginia and a possible rival to Hillary Clinton for the party’s presidential nomination in 2008. On Friday night he put on a lavish party, rumoured to have cost as much as $75,000 (£41,000), replete with chocolate fountains, live bands, Elvis impersonators and ethnic cuisine.

“You guys are here to stay,” he told them. “You are bringing renewed energy to our party. This is the new public square, the new face of democracy and the new face of the Democratic party.”

This was music to the ears of Zúniga, who clearly relishes the attention. He joked about his name “being plastered across this town — I’m sick of myself”. But, in declaring that he — and the blogosphere — were not yet ready to throw their weight behind any candidate for 2008, he sounded more like the leader of a fledgling political party than the cyberhost of a cacophony of voices.

Jerome Armstrong, with whom he recently co-authored a book on the netroots titled Crashing the Gate, is already working for Mr Warner.

Markos, as he is universally known, said that he would agonise some more about his endorsement while the candidates paid homage to bloggers and “tell us whether their vision is our vision”. In the meantime the courtship from the centrist, sensible Mr Warner suggested that “maybe we’re not the extremist whackos everybody thinks we are”.

Indeed, Markos loved Friday’s glamorous party, but some bloggers questioned the “love-in” between him and the former governor. The netroots pride themselves on their “outsider” status.If Mr Warner is to become a real alternative to Mrs Clinton as the Democrats’ choice in 2008, he will need the blogosphere. As the Dean campaign showed in 2004, the internet community can rapidly raise the millions of dollars needed for financing an “insurgency” against the Establishment, as well as mobilise an army of new activists.

But they have not yet had much success in elections. Mr Dean lost out to John Kerry two years ago, and the 13 Congressional candidates endorsed by Markos since then have also failed. If it is the “new public square” it is a very small one: 600,000 readers represent less than 0.5 per cent cent of American electorate.

As one recent posting on the Daily Kos said, if the bloggers are kingmakers, “where is the king?”. There is scant prospect of them backing a queen, particularly one who supported the Iraq war. Mrs Clinton may have a vast network of patronage spread across the party, but she is reviled by the blogosphere and wisely stayed out of Las Vegas. Markos is scathing about her: “Hillary is afraid to take the lead. We have the ability to say bull**** is bull****. She is tragic.”

Among the alternatives, Senator Russ Feingold, of Wisconsin, would seem a natural fit for most of the bloggers. He opposed the war and wants to censure the President over the Administration’s domestic wire-tapping programme.

But it was significant, perhaps, that Markos told The Times that he believed there were “electability issues” against Mr Feingold. He said that the blogosphere was about more than being left-wing. “We’re educating, motivating and engaging people to become active citizens. We’re not kingmakers, we’re footsoldiers,” he said.

If Markos wants to wield more influence over them, he will need a helmet made of tin thicker than foil.

CAUGHT IN THE NET

When Neil French, a British advertising executive, said at a private dinner in Toronto that women did not deserve to reach the top of his industry, he was revealed by a blogger

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