Years back, when I bought a house, someone gave me a piece of advice. Though I don't remember exactly who it was, I remember the guidance well. Don't pick a paint color by committee. You'll end up with a shade that doesn't particularly appeal to anyone.

I'm reminded of that today having just finished watching the White House's Open for Questions session where questions came in for the President through YouTube and Google Moderator. It's not a perfect fit. Some of the questions were very appealing to the people who submitted them. But while the project was intriguing, innovative, and exciting in concept, in execution it turned out that very few of the questions-via-YouTube got at topics that Obama hasn't addressed, repeatedly, in some other venue. The biggest winners today, perhaps, were the advocacy groups who got their questions into the dozen or so ones asked by YouTube news and politics editor Steve Grove to Obama.

There was a brief flurry of excitement when one of the early questions appeared to ask a question about hemp. But it turned out, in the end, that he was talking about HAMP -- HUD's Home Affordable Modification Program...

This week and last, we've been treated to a veritable mini-explosion of examples of how a thoroughly modern American president just might engage with the rest of the republic. First, last week we had Obama's gripping Q&A with House Republicans. The general consensus was that that was exciting stuff. And then there's the fact that this afternoon -- 1:45pm EST -- Obama will do a live interview where the questions have come from thousands of Americans who posted their thoughts to YouTube, loosely pegged to last week's State of the Union address.

But wait a minute -- if government worked more like it did in that charmed hour-and-a-half we witnessed in Baltimore on Friday, why do we need to "crowdsource" the job of questioning the President of United States to the people of what is, on paper, a representative democracy? (Especially when you think about the fact that this might have been the first time a rank-and-file Republican actually had the chance to ask Obama a question.) That's not, if we do say ourselves, an unworthy question. But it's completely possible to look at what's happening today with the YouTube Q&A, and the 11,700 questions posed and vetted by more than 55,000 Americans as wonderfully complementary to the excitement that went down in Baltimore the other day. This is a rich, verdant media universe we find ourselves in today, and when it comes to adding to the conversation, House Republicans bring a great deal to the table, and Americans without official political position or title do so as well.

If Friday's session was the ultimate in inside baseball -- the airing of complaints over whether proposal X,Y, and or Z have been given short shrift by Congress' Democratic leadership, and so on -- then we might think about the niche that YouTube questioning of the President fills as being wonderfully "outside baseball."...

The first half-hour of yesterday's 70-minute presidential health reform event at Northern Virginia Community College was given over to a pair of introduction and then opening remarks from President Barack Obama. The White House collected more than 450 video questions through YouTube in the days leading up to the event. Obama answered three of them. Not many, to be sure. But then again, a total of just eight questions on the proposed overhaul of the American health care system got asked in the hour-plus session, regardless of whether they came by video, via Twitter, or in the flesh...

The folks at the National Academy of Public Administration who are managing the White House's Open Government Initiative brainstorm site have posted a call to participants for help. Specifically, help in voting down "postings you feel are counterproductive to maintaining a free-flowing exchange of ideas" and help in flagging content "that you feel is duplicative or inappropriate to the discussion."

While the post speaks only in general terms, it's clear that it's a reaction to the flood of posts in recent days from people raising questions about President Obama's birth certificate and his eligibility to be president (whom I derisively referred to as the "birthers.")

I'm not sure how unique this is amongst state and local candidates, but here's a sign that what might be called the Obama model of digital politics is trickling down to lower ticket races. It was perhaps under-commented upon during the Open for Question days that the new president of the United States chose to use a completely no-cost tool freely available to the rest of us, rather than go the proprietary route. That means that every ambitious candidate down to the town council level can mimic some of Obama's efforts. Here, Tom Campbell, a Republican candidate for California governor, is using Google Moderator to solicit ideas on the budget, water, schools, and more. Campbell explains above.

Sheila Campbell and Rachel Flagg kick off the second plenary session of the Government Web Managers Conference, noting that this the seventh annual web managers conference. (In 2001, it was just 12 people sitting around a conference room, Sheila notes.) They also note that these sessions are open to the media, but the breakouts will be off the record. Up next are Katie Stanton, director of citizen participation for the White House, and Bev Godwin, director, online resources & interagency development, White House. Their topic is citizen participation and engagement, and we expect to hear about new initiatives to engage the public online, and what people can do at their agency to build greater participation with target audiences. Again, here are my verbatim notes, not precisely for quotation, though when I put something in quotes, it's pretty accurate. Comments and observations in [brackets].

The White House is taking a third bite at the apple, answering still more questions generated by its Open for Questions experiment from a few weeks back. You'll remember that after President Barack Obama responded to questions asked of him on the Internet in a live town hall, the presidential conch shell was passed to staff. Kareem Dale, the president's point person on disability policy, tackled a health care question having to do with the challenges the disabled face in keeping their insurance coverage when getting a job. This time, Joe Biden's economist Jared Bernstein is on the White House blog answering also-ran questions on returning manufacturing to the United States, military spending, and the wisdom of paying down the national debt -- you know, stuff he actually knows a few things about. It's encouraging to see the White House appreciate the idea that Americans might just be thoughtful enough to want to hear from policy experts, not just presidents.

You have to give it to the Obama White House -- they do seem to be embracing the freedom of constant iteration. Forget the ol' Microsoft box-and-ship software paradigm. Instead, this administration is like coders tweaking in the night. Here's the latest build of their online "Open for Questions" town hall, kicked off last week at the White House. There was, they note, "one video question that we had particularly hoped to get to, however, and ended up missing out on." No worries! This is the Internet, so take another pass at it.

The question comes from 28 year-old graduate student Becky Blitch who's quadriplegic and doesn't want to upend her current health insurance situation by getting a job. The direct response comes from Special Assistant to the President for Disability Policy Kareem Dale, who also happens to be blind. By having Dale take the detailed policy questions rather than President Obama, the White House is picking up on a suggestion made in these parts and elsewhere that web tools can be used to connect citizens directly to the best sources of the information they're after -- which isn't necessarily, or even very often, going to be the fellow in the Oval Office.

You may have heard that during yesterday's Open for Questions event at the White House, President Obama interrupted MC Jared Bernstein to address a question that had demonstrated considerable mojo in the online forum. "I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high," he said to a chuckling audience, "and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation." Breaking out into a smile, Obama got in a dig at those crazy kids on the Internet: "I don't know what that says about the online audience." That online audience is now abuzz with discussion over the incident. Did Obama behave badly? Did "we" -- to use the word loosely -- behave badly by giving such a high profile to the question (in a creative interpretation of the "green jobs" category)? In very brief, the arguments in favor and against...

The argument in favor of the legalization question: With rather horrendous drug-fueled violence in Mexico increasingly in the news -- and especially in light of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's admission that the U.S. is partially culpable because of our considerable appetite for illegal narcotics -- legalization is a timely and important policy topic. Besides, millions of Americans make use of the marijuana on occasion, whether for recreational or medicinal reasons. Web tools like Google Moderator are simply tapping into that collective interest, even if it's not one often discussed in polite society. And that's exactly the sort of opening up of communications channels that Internet-powered politics promising.

The argument against: NORML and other marijuana advocates unfairly manipulated Google Moderator to promote their question to the top of a citizens' forum, hijacking and event that was meant to focus on the economy in general and in particular the president's budget proposal. Obama respected the spirit of online openness and participation by addressing the question, while acting like a good moderator and not letting the forum get off topic.

So, which is it? Your thoughts?

A day after President Barack Obama's Internet-powered town hall event and the reviews are in! And the verdict is...well...something happened yesterday. And it was a something that was happening for the first time. Beyond that, well, hmmm. The White House reported that some 64,000 people had tuned into the live webcast, and the White House Mystery Blogger™ celebrated the event as having "an amazing feel of something that had never been done before, and something we should be trying to do more of." The Washington Post's Michael A. Fletcher and Jose Antonio Vargas remarked upon the forum's radical ordinariness, despite the participation of the Internets: "Despite the technical elements and the regal venue, the meeting had the feel of a typical presidential town hall meeting in Elkhart, Ind." The New York Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg applies a traditional media metric to be leaned upon in these confusing times; she writes: "Mr. Obama did make a sliver of news, disclosing that he intended to announce...what kind of help his administration would give the auto industry." White House new media director Macon Phillips told CNN's Kyra Phillips that he was "pleasantly surprised by the response" to the call for questions. Phillips also offered that the view from within the White House was that the "experiment" was "pretty exciting." Wired's Nicholas Thompson offers what might be an especially prudent judgment of the whole affair, deeming it "drama-free OKness."

If you missed yesterday's event, the LA Times' Johanna Neuman highlights the questions that got the nod. And as we're ever forward-looking, check out the Harvard's Gene Koo's suggestions on how we might get from ground-breaking "OKness" to get to something even more compelling.