10 Questions - a solution to the YouTube debate

While scanning through Wired Magazine today, I noticed a story titled "Web 2.0 Project Taps 'Wisdom of the Crowd' to Probe Presidential Contenders" and thought it may be of interest for our social media class.

Lately we've been talking about the use of social media tools such as Facebook, MySpace and personal blogs by presidential candidates. We also spent some time discussing the YouTube debate and how much of a failure this was because the candidates couldn't or rather wouldn't take the questions seriously.

This was not only a failure for the candidates but also for the American voters. The candidates blew an awesome opportunity to show that they really care about America's citizens and the voters still didn't get the questions they were really concerned about answered.

This is attempt number two. Since the first one was such a failure and there was so much controversy about how the videos were chosen, a new effort called 10 questions was launched Wednesday.

The way this works is very similar to the original YouTube debate. People can submit videos of themselves asking their questions but instead of someone going through the questions and choosing which ones would be best for the candidate to answer, people can go to the 10 Questions Website and vote to move the video up or down a list in a kind of Digg-like tool. The top ten videos will be presented to each candidate completely unedited. The Website also offers its feedback on whether the candidate actually answered the question asked.

Here is the top video as of Sunday evening:



If you were to submit a video what would you ask and how would you present yourself. A big problem with the first debate was that people's use of creativity, as we saw in class with the snowman question, seemed to turn the candidates off to actually answering the question. Do you think it's ok to be a little creative to get your question across or do you think a serious answer deserves a serious question?