Either someone smart is working with Senator – and would-be POTUS – Hillary Clinton, or she is a lot hipper to the Web 2.0 jive than I might have thought.
According to Search Engine Journal, Hillary (or someone from her team) posted a question about health-care on Yahoo Answers, and last time I looked she had gotten more than 33,000 responses in just a little over 24 hours.
The question she has asked is this: “Based on your own family’s experience, what do you think we should do to improve health care in America?” Underneath the question, the site makes it clear that hosting the question isn’t meant to express support for any particular party (maybe Barack Obama should post a question asking “Should I change my name or sue CNN for calling me Osama?”). This is interesting stuff – call it Politics 2.0.
Obviously, there’s some publicity value to having the question appear on Yahoo Answers, since I would imagine other people are going to notice it and write about it other than Search Engine Journal, Greg Sterling of Screenwerk and me. Incidentally, as far as I can tell Ms. Clinton now holds the record for most responses to a question on Yahoo, beating both Oprah and physicist Stephen Hawking, whose flirtation with Yahoo Answers I wrote about on my media blog awhile back.
Still, apart from the pure publicity value, and the street cred she gets for being down with the Web 2.0 kids, I would agree with Greg that there is definitely something interesting going on here. Where it will lead (if anywhere) remains to be seen.
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Mathew Ingram is a
technology writer and blogger for the Globe and Mail, a national
newspaper based in Toronto, and also writes about the Web and media at
www.mathewingram.com/work and www.mathewingram.com/media.
