Crowdsource Group Questions With Google Moderator

I am super, super excited about the just-launched Google Moderator, built by Platform Engineer Taliver Heath during his 20% time.  It’s supposed to let users rank submitted forum questions (ala Digg) so that the good stuff floats to the top.

Nate, Ross, and I have been toying around the past couple weeks at KPBS with Ustreaming Editors Roundtable on Friday mornings, having previously streamed the San Diego Mayoral and City Attorney debates.

I’d recently set this up on the fly for Editors remotely from Denver immediately after the DNC, and just as news was breaking about Sarah Palin getting the nod as GOP VP nominee.

Ustream’s chat component in this case proved especially useful since we encountered audio problems so that Gloria, in Denver, couldn’t hear questions from callers listening in San Diego.  I ended up curating and feeding chat room user questions to Hank, a radio producer, via Skype.  Those eventually were read on the air and discussed, and it was all good.

But if we fully launch and promote a regular web component to Editors Roundtable — which I hope we can — we might start getting more questions than we can effectively cull from, in which case this Google rollout could be perfectly timed.  I’ll definitely be testing it out.

Via TechCrunch.