President goes online to answer questions Thursday morning

President Barack Obama will hold his first online question and answer session with American citizens tomorrow at 11:30 a.m. Eastern. Obama will appear via live streamed video on WhiteHouse.gov, answering questions submitted online.

“We’re going to try something a little different. We are going to take advantage of the Internet to bring all of you to the White House to talk about the economy,” he says in an introductory video on the site.

More than 32,000 questions had been submitted by this afternoon. Americans can vote for their favorite questions, and Obama promises to answer the most popular. Americans may submit questions, and vote on others’ queries, until 9:30 a.m. ET Thursday.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Don Tapscott told CNN.com today. “It turns out that the Internet is a new medium of human communication that not only helps you get elected, it changes the way you govern.”

Former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton engaged in online chats with citizens, but neither relied on the Internet as a platform for reaching the American public as Obama does, said Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum and the techPresident blog.

“It’s changing the relationship between the president and the country,” Rasiej told CNN.com. “It’s building on a 21st-century information age platform. We want to make sure our president isn’t stuck in a bubble.”

Launching an online town hall meeting will allow more effective communication with citizens, said Ellen Miller, executive director at the Sunlight Foundation, a group that advocates government transparency. Americans can submit their own questions and receive direct responses without questions or answers being filtered by the media, she told CNN.

“There might be a question asked that wouldn’t have been asked at a press conference,” she said. “It’s a significant step forward for new-media communications.”