Google Moderator – Ask a Question

 I was reading Matt’s blog the other day and he shared a new google service called – Google Moderator. It’s a small application initially created for submitting and voting on the questions for Google’s tech talks. So whats the purpose of Google Moderator? Matt Explains:

When we have tech talks or company-wide meetings, it lets anyone ask a question and then people can vote up the questions that they’d like answered.

The interface looks something like below:

Google Moderator was built by Taliver Heath as a side project and it was created on Google App Engine. He describes the product on the Google App Engine blog:

I designed a tool in my 20% time that would allow anyone attending a tech talk to submit a question, and then give other participants a way to vote on whether or not that question should be asked. This way, the most popular and relevant questions would rise to the top so that the presenter or the moderator of an event could run the discussion more efficiently and in a transparent manner. The tool, which we internally called “Dory” after our favorite question-asking fish in Finding Nemo, quickly grew to other parts of Google including our weekly all-hands company meeting, as well as for our series of talks led by political candidates or distinguished authors.

Within Google Moderator, you can easily create a specific topic for questions to be asked in. These topics are called series; one such series is “Ask a Google engineer,” where you have the opportunity to ask a question to the famous Google employees like Adam Lasnik, Matt Cutts, Jeff Dean, Andrew Morton and others. Other series currently available are “Ask a world leader”, “Suggest an Android Application”, and “U.S. Presidential Debates 2008”.

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