It’s that time of the year again - time to launch the New Statesman New Media Awards.

We kicked this year’s awards off last night with an informal evening of discussion and conversation under the heading of “Politics and new media:where next?”. Helping us gaze into the crystal ball were Tom Steinberg, director of MySociety; Jo Twist, a senior fellow at IPPR and a former technology journalist at the BBC; and Alan Connor, broadcast journalist for BBC Westminster.

As everyone who went will tell you, it was a fascinating - and invigorating - evening, and a really exciting start to what should be the best New Media Awards yet. Indeed, feedback is already online from political blogger Guido Fawkes, and from David Wilcox over at Designing for Civic Society. If you couldn’t make it - or didn’t find out about it in time - have no fear: we’ll be putting a live recording of the event up on this site within the next day or two as a podcast. Details of future evenings in a similar vein - of which there will be a series - will be posted on this blog, so make sure you stay up-to-date (perhaps by subscribing to the RSS feed).

Update: Further feedback from Rob Fenwick and Paul over at “Never Trust a Hippy”. Guido Fawkes and Recess Monkey also recorded one of their podcasts at the event.