Obama said last year that he'd be the first president to appoint a CTO. Speculation has such high-profile leaders as Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in the running, but the Obama team hasn't offered any hints about the candidate they are considering.

Whoever ends up with the job can look at the new Web site to see what issues the general public thinks should be made priorities. The site, created by Seattle's , went live Wednesday and already has hundreds of ideas posted. The top idea, "ensure the Internet is widely accessible and network neutral," had more than 8,300 votes by Thursday afternoon.

Front Seat founder and chairman Mike Mathieu has no idea if anyone working for Obama knows the site exists. But perhaps reflecting the true bottom-up approach that his new Web site promotes, he said that someone who supposedly knows the person doing the CTO search for Obama told Mathieu he would send a link to the site to that person, but Mathieu has no idea if that actually happened.

Front Seat did very minimal promotion of the new site, amounting to several hundred e-mails sent to friends of Mathieu and his two colleagues. By Wednesday night the site was receiving a thousand or more votes per hour, he said.

The voting system isn't precise, but it's close enough to give an idea what people favor. Each visitor, based on their IP address, gets 10 votes on the site and is limited to three votes for any one item.