Obama’s transitional government website, change.gov, unveiled a new Digg-like section where anyone can submit ideas or questions, and others can vote on whether or not they’d like to see the topic addressed.

The new section is powered by Google’s Moderator service, which was just announced by Google as a new application built on their Google App Engine platform back in September, 2008.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the number one topic at the time of this article’s writing was "What will you do to establish transparency and safeguards against waste with the rest of the Wall Street bailout money?" with "What will you do as President to restore the Constitutional protections that have been subverted by the Bush Administration and how will you ensure that our system of checks and balances is renewed?" not far behind.

It’s unclear how Google might handle people trying to flood the service with fake/invalid up or down votes.  But it’s a great idea nonetheless, and a great way for Google to get some publicity for its Moderator application.

BEA Systems, Inc. did something similar to this during their Participate conference back in May 2008.  All participants were given Apple iPod Touch devices with a bookmark to a web application that allowed them to anonymously submit topics and vote on them for a crowd-determined session with Product Managers and VPs.

Filed under: Consumer Web, Social Computing