It's a big leap of faith: that you and millions of other Americans will have enough faith in the power of a good question to keep Presidential candidates on their toes and lawmakers accountable. They need to know you are watching them, that you care! We are betting you do - that this election year you will ask questions you think journalists should be asking, that you will add your voice to questions others have asked, that you will use and share the audio answers our journalists track down for you.

But who knows? We've spent the last nine months on developing the site and widgets, making sure everything is functioning and that the site is intuitive and easy to use. We hope we've achieved that in this 1.0 version. But thanks to your usage and feedback (please keep it coming!) we have a long (OK, very long) list of things we want to improve. But so far so good: Just a month after launching this 1.0 version of AskYourLawmaker.org, some promising initial stats from our friends at Google: folks are spending an average of eight minutes on the site.

And the widget is being used by hundreds of sites, including many of our public radio partners, like WAMU 88.5 FM here in Washington, KQED in San Francisco, WNYC in New York, and KGOU in Oklahoma City among others. And bloggers are also beginning to use the widget: Thanks TechPresident.com for your referral.

Plus through Clearspring.com, we now have applications of the widget that can be used on Facebook.com, MySpace.com, Apple Dashboard and many others.

But most importantly the questions you are sending us are good, and our reporters on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire are doing their best to track down candidates to make sure your questions get answered. Once Congress returns, we'll be getting as many as 10 questions answered each day - with a special push the night of the State of the Union.

So keep asking, listening and sharing!