Oracle.com has turned its homepage into a listening post; unregistered visitors to the page can submit ideas, comments and suggestions. Registered visitors can submit ideas which can be voted up or down by other members in the Oracle community. Look for the “Participate with Oracle” box on the top right hand side.

“This idea is similar to the Dell Ideastorm concept, which famously led the company to introduce its first Linux based PC (as the community voted this as most popular idea suggestion). The big difference being that Oracle is using its home page,” writes Dan Young of Justanotherday.

It’s critical that Oracle has the resources in place to make sense of the vast number of comments and ideas that it hopes to receive because messages that go un-noticed can easily undo all of the theoretical benefit with this sort of approach as the comment below demonstrates. Oracle claims that executives will be ‘directly involved’ in this process with plans to extend this into a permanent feature of Oracle’s customer interactions, said Young.

The experiment ends on September 25 and after that Oracle intends to transform this experience into a permanent fixture of Oracle’s brand-to-community-to-brand conversation. In a few months, we will report back not only on the results of this program from an input perspective, but also our plans from an output perspective. In other words, we intend to walk the talk - even if it means learning to crawl first, according to Justin Kestelyn of Oracle.