Today the Heritage Foundation hosted a panel discussion on "How Bloggers Claimed Their First Major Policy Victory."

Panel participants included Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation, N.Z. Bear of Porkbusters.org, Rebecca Carr of Cox News Service, Justin Rood of TPMmuckraker.com and Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner.

Moderated by the Heritage Foundation's Tim Chapman, panelists focused on the roll the blogosphere played in the passage of the Coburn-Obama transparency bill and discussed its future roll in public policy.

The discussion was filmed and fed over a live feed. I'm going to dig through the archive now and try to get it posted for those of you interested. I'll have more on the discussion in a bit as well...

UPDATE -- 10/5/06 @ 10:25 a.m.: Okay, got it.

Here's the video of the panel discussion is now available at heritage.org.

As I mentioned above, panelist participants consisted of an interesting mix of old and new media that included bloggers, traditional journalists and think tank representatives -- making for an informative discussion.

Asked to address the implications of the blogosphere's ability to push the Coburn-Obama transparency bill through Congress, N.Z. Bear said, "When I think about this bill and how it got through, I think less about the blogosphere than what it means for the country, honestly. Adding that "the reason that this bill passed -- lit the blogosphere on fire so much and had such a push behind it -- was because it was so blindly, obviously a good thing."

Rebecca Carr, the Cox News report who first broke the story on the hold, said she could hardly believe the ability of the blogosphere to get ordinary citizens involved in "smoking out" the bill's secret holder(s).

"I have to say as a traditional print journalist I was amazed at the power of the blog. I couldn't get over how effective they were at holding this government accountable," she said. "Oftentimes in Washington what you see is this caste system where if it's not in the New York Times or the Washington Post it doesn't matter. And suddenly I was seeing that it didn't matter that I wasn't the Washington Post or the New York Times because my stories were being posted on their websites or being mentioned at their websites and they were actually carrying the ball even further and I think, in tandem, we exposed a questionable practice of holding up legislation in the eleventh hour because of, for reasons I still don't really know. It's still not clear to me what the problem was with the bill."

Bear said the reason so many people got involved was because 1) people thought it was right and 2) they had fun doing it.

Once bloggers caught wind of a secret hold, they picked up the story and ran with it, educating their readers along the way -- something Carr found fascinating to watch.

"I thought what was so exciting about what the bloggers were doing is they started to expose the secretive nature of Congress," she said. "It sort of unraveled, ironically, how Congress doesn't just place secret holds on legislation, but how Congress also has secret earmarks, and how Congress passes things in the dead of night, and this whole notion that the government is by the people in an open way is really at stake here because the public feels so disenfranchised by the way Congress does its legislative duty."

Bloggers rallied their readers to contact all 100 senators and ask them if they were holding the bill. Without the manpower to make the calls themselves, bloggers utilized the tools they had available -- namely the Internet -- to entreat their readers to help them out -- and they did.

"No one of us is as smart, or skillful, or as experienced as all of us together," said Mark Tapscott. "The great thing about the Internet is it gives us a way of simulaneously focusing all of our talents, and experiences and knowledges on a particular problem...that's the power of it."

The bloggers' triumph has been hailed as particularly unique because of the bipartisan effort behind it. But those involved at its core say their ideological stances had little to do with it.

"Corruption really is a non-partisan issue," Bill Allison pointed out. "I think that the very outrageousness of a secret hold to stop a public disclosure bill it what really got people interested in it."

Justin Rood agreed, adding that outside of Washington, D.C. people on both sides of the aisle are concerned about wasteful spending.

"I think that if you step outside the betway I think you'd be hard-pressed to make an argument to somebody that they would buy that this is a partisan issue," Rood said. "It's hard to find two sides to it."

Public outrage over congressional secrets highlight the difference between Capitol Hill and the American people.

"The problem is that Washington's going one direction and the rest of the country's going another direction," Carr said. "What I see the bloggers doing...is basically exposing what goes on here and making it relevant to the public outside the beltway...and make them care.

"[Bloggers] do have a very important role in the fourth estate and they do have a critical role in keeping our politicians honest," she said.

(Read more on the discussion from Tim Chapman and Mark Tapscott).