You know what, I think they’ve cracked it.

Last night, I had just returned home from another cracking Journobiz drinks night, and was just in time for the third and final US Presidential Debate.

Since I don’t have the luxury of digital telly in my bedroom, I turned to the web to follow what was going on.

My first port of call ended up being my only port of call. The BBC’s online coverage of the debate was the best I’ve seen. Take a look.

On first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a bog standard liveblog. In many ways, it is, but look closely and you’ll see some brilliant additions to the format.

Most noticable is the video panel at the top. Nothing exceptional here — it was a live stream of the debate. Refreshing, I thought, that there were no tickers, timestamps or distracting logos anywhere.

Beneath was the live blog. We’ve all seen the format before: writer timestamps each snippet, and places it in an existing post. The same rules applied here, but with one subtle difference: you didn’t need to refresh to get the updates. Why is this significant? Well, bear in mind the video stream is on the same page, it would be very frustrating indeed to have to refresh and re-buffer the video just to see the text comments. Chances are you wouldn’t bother… you would just watch the video.

So far, so brilliant. It worked beautifully. The script was smooth, seamless and — with it’s tasty fade-in style appearance — was somewhat classy. By far the best I’ve seen. It was active and quick, but if you wanted to ignore it you easily could.

A few days ago I posted about how journalists should be using Twitter. That post focused on how journalists should be using Twitter themselves. Perhaps I should have written about what we should do with other people on Twitter. In other words, those thousands who are posting their opinions by the second. Surely it can be channeled into something useful?

Why yes! Yes it can. Someone at the BBC had the task of cherry-picking the best, most relevant tweets.

And I can say it was a success. It’s a shame that they didn’t make it more clear how to get involved in the discourse, however. There were no addresses to email, or numbers to text, and although I’m assuming that the moderator was following hashtags (#debate08), we weren’t told which tags they were.

Other improvements could have been a little more linky-love, as some call it. We got comments from bloggers — but none of them were linked to. Would it have been unfair to expect the BBC to publicise the authors of the comments deemed interesting enough to go on their site?

This is a format that can trump television. It’s engaging and polished. And, above all else, it packages social media in a way that goes beyond simple “Bill from Stoke says ‘It’s political correctness gone mad’” comments. Now we can enjoy thoughtful, intelligent reaction. Social media is coming of age and maybe, just maybe, it’ll save mainstream media.