Nine more videos were added to 10Questions Monday, bringing the total to 56. We were flirting with hitting 20,000 votes from nearly 5,000 users, and attention was spread widely across the site, with even the least viewed videos earning at least 25 votes. We had about 3,000 unique visits, with top referrers being Hugh Hewitt, MSNBC, Digg, the New York Times, Huffington Post, Crooks and Liars, Balloon-Juice.com, organic Google search and PoliticsTV.

Newer videos are moving up to the front page regularly, with questions touching on how to pay for the Iraq war, how to classify the "war on terrorism," and asking whether "America is unofficially a theocracy" leading the pack. YouTube user kameny's question about warrantless wiretapping has the most net votes, with 1789 as of this afternoon. Elsewhere on the site, questions about taxes, marital rights, solar energy, reading blogs, and health care are showing up. Iraq is a dominant theme.

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The biggest news today came from our partner the New York Times Editorial Board, whose new blog today explains in detail their reasons for joining in 10Questions: “Beyond the YouTube Debate: You Ask, They Answer (We Hope)”:

Three presidential elections have come and gone since 1993, when the concept of the Internet started to gain familiarity outside the offices of Silicon Valley and the labs at MIT, and when the term was first explained in a Times article by John Markoff.

It’s surprising, then, that a medium that has so fully permeated almost every corner of modern society has not made a proportionate dent in American presidential campaigns.

Howard Dean’s use of the Web and the influence of blogs aside, the Internet’s big promise of universal access has yet to be felt in the way voters engage with candidates or in the process in general, beyond raising money.

The CNN/YouTube Democratic debate in July took one step in a more participatory direction. Its Republican parallel is scheduled for November. But as Adam Cohen, a member of this board, noted in an Editorial Observer article, while it entertained viewers and injected a breath of new life to an old format, it hardly helped uncover new information about the candidates. Ultimately, it was CNN that chose the questions, not its viewers.

To help infuse more of the Web’s unpredictability and spontaneity into the political process, TechPresident, a non-partisan group that is tracking candidates’ use of technology in the long — very long — 2008 campaign, recently launched 10Questions. The aim is to give voters not only a platform from which to ask questions of their own devising, as in the CNN/YouTube debate, but also to choose which questions will ultimately be posed to the presidential contenders by voting on the submissions.

The Times Editorial Board is collaborating with TechPresident on this project; we will help them get word out about it and also help to deliver the final questions to the candidates. MSNBC is also participating, and a host of blogs from across the political spectrum are cosponsors. We decided to get involved with 10 Questions because we have high hopes that it will help us learn something new about the current roster of presidential hopefuls and enliven a political process that is in desperate need of enlivening.

As of this posting, there are 57 video questions on subjects like national security strategy, transparency in government, whether or not to ban cartoon images of Native Americans. They have been uploaded by citizens of states like California, Nevada, Florida, New York, and Texas who have shot their videos from their living rooms, backyards and the beach. One questioner features his cat within the frame along side his talking head (at least the cat is cute).

Although we may be amused, intrigued, and even moved by these videos, their value is not up to us to decide. It is up to you.

Co-sponsor PageOneQ also weighed in with a long introductory post to its readers: http://pageoneq.com/news/2007/PageOneQ_sponsors_10Questions_1022.html

Also, co-sponsor The New York Observer plugged a question on Congressional Term Limits: http://www.observer.com/2007/10-questions-congressional-term-limits

Other interesting links:

The Social Media class blog run by the students at the University of Georgia called 10Questions “a solution to the YouTube debate”: http://socialmediauga.blogspot.com/2007/10/10-questions-solution-to-youtube-debate.html

Britt Bravo included 10Questions in a great rundown of “Four Steps to Ease You Into Social Web Activism”: http://havefundogood.blogspot.com/2007/10/four-steps-to-ease-you-into-social-web.html