In less than one day this question by Senator Clinton on health care has resulted in an estimated 1,250 pages of responses.

And the problem is that the volume of responses is so great and varied, that her staff will throw up their hands and conclude that they can't do anything with it. It's not surprising that someone would take advantage of the internet like this to get more or less immediate feedback, but I think that free-form answers like on Yahoo Answers will not provide concise and useful feedback. Someone will have to read through all this stuff and spend a TON of time analyzing every response in order to gather any meaningful trends from it. Spending that time robs you of the benefits of the immediacy of getting the information. You can speed up the process by having a bunch of different people working on it, but ultimately what they're going to be doing is interpreting the concepts in each answer and dropping them in a "bucket" so that different things can be tallied up (one "bucket" might be people who suggest socialized medicine, another would be people who suggest government subsidies of the health insurance industry, etc.). Having different people interpret and score those things opens the whole process up to the shortcomings of subjective interpretations (one person might see a particular answer one way, while another person classifies that answer in a much different way) which cloud the issue. If the rate of answers keeps up, she's likely to get 15,000+ pages of suggestions, all guaranteed to be individual and greatly varied - how do you make anything out of that in a reasonable way? I guess the best thing you could determine immediately is that health care is an important issue, regardless of specifically HOW you approach it.