Jeff Bennett's Blog

President-Elect Obama’s website Change.gov launched a new set of social media functionality today called “Open for Questions.” This sure looks like Digg to me and that is good as I believe the Digg model is great.

The Obama team is reporting that since its launch yesterday, the “Open for Questions” tool has processed over 600,000 votes from more than 10,000 people on more than 7,300 questions. Voting will come to a close Friday, December 12th, at 12:00 a.m. EST, so that Team Obama can prepare answers to some of the most popular questions.

Participation in Open for Questions outpaced expectations and they are tremendously excited about the promise of tools like this that offer Americans a level of access that has historically been hard to come by. By voting questions up, users have been able to convey the Obama team which major issues — like the auto industry, health care, ethical standards, and others — are the most important to this community.

Obama surely maximized social media tools to win the Presidency and now it looks like he is going to continue to make full use of them to try to run an open and transparent democracy in his administration.

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