'Google Moderator' tool takes on lecture-hall chaos

When I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York last week, many of the panelists and speakers invited the audience to ask them questions by submitting Twitter messages. A Google engineer named Taliver Heath has gone one step further by creating Google Moderator, an application that lets the audiences at lectures and discussions submit questions and vote on the ones they'd like to hear answered.

Google Moderator, earlier named "Dory" after the inquisitive fish from Finding Nemo, started out as an internal tool. It was originally intended for the audiences at Google's "Tech Talks" series, then was extended to company all-hands meetings and other lectures at the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

"There was never enough time for all the questions, and it wasn't clear that the best questions were the ones actually getting asked," Heath wrote in a blog post. "And since many of these talks were led by offices outside of Mountain View, it became harder for distributed audiences to participate."

After a few requests, Google has now released Moderator to the general public as part of its Google App Engine platform, and it's now available for free use. I'll start by asking a question about Moderator: What if audiences are too busy reading and voting on question submissions to actually listen?

[howard_nyc]

Q: at what point does a lecture, event or discussion actually end?

or, is it 'evergreen'... alway growing and therefore alive till the end of time...

[donkeyontheedge]

interesting question, we made the decision at the lecture list (http://lecturelist.org) to keep all lectures live on the system in the hope that some clever folk might use this history for research. (I haven't worked out what exactly that would be but wanted to build at least the collection of raw data)

[CBD1960]

Great now Google wants to intertwine themselves into our lives by letting machines regulate our actions.

Smarten up people!

Keep El Goog in check... or soon you'll be sending them your paychecks in order to survive.

[billylinguist]

The question about the audience being too busy to listen reminds me of the iphone giveaway in Texas:
http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/hughes/23920

I don't think the issue that people might be to busy too listen is new. I was too busy (doodling, ogling, etc.) to pay attention back in the days when the really flash students had portable typewriters.

B-)

[gjl229]

It's good to talk about the amount of time actually spent listening, as opposed to doing email, eyeing attractive others, texting friends about important (as seen at the moment) matters, or even taking notes.

But listening is only the first part.

It took me years to learn that I had to pay very close attention to turn listening into understanding. And it required fierce concentration to ferret out some of the implications of what I was dimly beginning to understand.

We seem increasingly able to turn out students, in the schools and the workplace, who are able to produce grades out of all proportion to the understanding gained. Multi-tasking is a fine way to occupy space, look busy, and perhaps catch a few facts as they fly by. It rarely permits the acquisition of perspective or the use of inductive/deductive reasoning.

When did we start to take so much pride in doing so many things so badly at the same time?

[benjaminstraight]

cool

[UITD]

The problem is that people's attention spans need to be a bit longer than an IM chat session. This is ludicrous. We've lost control of ourselves. Cant wait for the implosion to occur. I'll sit back and watch. At the very least, I will have the patience to do so.