YouTube announced today that in conjunction with CNN the site is now offering an opportunity for users to submit and vote on questions for world leaders to be asked at next week’s UN Climate Change Conference.
It’s the first use of the Digg-like Google Moderator on YouTube and the whole endeavor looks a lot like the Digg Dialogue series with leaders and celebrities. Can events like this draw a significant crowd to hear about the issues? How do crowd-voted questions stack up against questions thought up by expert journalists? Can anything YouTube and CNN do prevent the tides from rising so far that these become academic questions in short order? Stay tuned to find out.
It’s very nice to see YouTube leveraging its audience to try to prevent the displacement of hundreds of millions of people and the degradation of all life on earth. Hopefully there will be a big ad on the front page pointing to the campaign. It’s not hard to imagine other very large websites doing something similar. It could make a difference!
