Nearly two years ago, I helped pen a posting here, suggesting that politicians should embrace a new town hall format. The idea was that the Internet and user-ranked questions would help leverage a community's voice and provide real insight into the minds of constituents. Not only that, the Internet promised to grow the size of the town hall, putting more people "in the room" than ever before. This morning I watched the President's Internet Town Hall, comprised primarily of user-ranked questions, and I'm glad to see how far we've come. In fact, yesterday the General Services Administration announced agreements allowing the use of Flickr, YouTube, and Blip.tv by federal agencies, a large step in the right direction towrds meeting people where they're at on the Internet. However, these are only the first steps.

If you dedicated an hour of your life last night to watching Obama's second presidential press conference, then you saw that the way the president ticked through the list of pre-selected reporters made it seem like he could have benefited from the help of a maître d'. "Is Lourdes here?," he asked at one point, one eye on his master press list. Univision's Lourdes Meluza was there, got in a question about violence in Mexico. Obama called on 13 different reporters, including those from specialized publications like Stars & Stripes and Ebony magazine, as well as from all four major TV networks (ABC, CBS, FOX, and CNN). But, Politico's Michael Calderone notes, Obama didn't call on a single reporter from a major newspaper -- no New York Times, no Washington Post, no Wall Street Journal. (The Washington Times did get a question in, but their reach doesn't extend much beyond the Beltway.) Plum Line's Greg Sargent cautions against using last night's press conference to add weight to the idea that Obama is actively trying to route around some sort of traditional media filter. "The fracturing of information channels in the new media age and the weakening power of the big news orgs," he writes, "are driving this as much as anything."

ABC's George Stephanopoulos makes the case that the smaller outlets asked targeted questions -- on homelessness, on veterans affairs -- that wouldn't get asked by more general-interest publications.

Of course, Personal Democracy Forum has partnered up with Ask the President, an effort to add a structured framework to tapping the collective thinking of the American people during these sorts of press rituals. (As of this morning, 5,800 people have voted on 875 questions on ATP.) That's a practice that journalists at the White House last night also subscribe to. NBC's Chuck Todd and ABC's Jake Tapper, as the Nation's Ari Melber notes, have discussed a willingness to solicit citizen questions using tools like blogs and Twitter. But without a more structured way of doing it, there's still a good amount of journalistic gut involved. As Tapper tweeted just before the press conference began, ""thx 4 all the great q's...am bringing into briefing 32 pp of q's." With time for only one or perhaps two queries of the president, though, wrote Tapper, "will have to call an audible."

• Melissa Jenna Compagnucci (didn't we see her in one of the YouTube debates?) posts a YouTube video plugging "Ask the President."
• The Washington Times on its support for "Ask the President."
• EchoDitto's Michael Silberman digs deep into the Obama tech operation and how it moved online enthusiasm into on-the-ground activism. The secret? Data, data, data.
• The Obama team is recruiting new media directors for various government agencies. Details here.
• Recovery.gov is spawning a web of sites and structured data at a fast pace, writes Greg Elin.

On the first full day of his presidency, Barack Obama issued an executive memo calling on the government to become more transparent, participatory and collaborative. He wrote:

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

Of course, public participation is a two-way street. That's why, today, Personal Democracy Forum is proud to announce that we are partnering with a cross-partisan coalition of old and new media in launching "Ask the President," an open, collaborative, participatory forum where anyone can post a question and vote up their favorites. Our lead partners, The Nation magazine and The Washington Times, have committed to send a credentialed journalist to every presidential press conference armed with a list of the top citizen-driven questions, aiming to ask the President at least one generated by the public.