Talk about irony: Although we’re living through a financial crisis that we created ourselves, Google is touting the so-called “wisdom of the crowds” to offer financial help. That’s the premise behind today’s announcement of TipJar.

TipJar is sorta like Yahoo Answers, only without the questions. It’s people submitting answers to the question, How can I save money? It’s also sorta like reddit, in that users can vote up or down on each tip. But as much as anything else, it seems like a working demo for Google Moderator.

It’s an interesting experiment and shows off Moderator’s capabilities quite well. Whether or not TipJar itself remains interesting will depend on the user contributions and quality of the financial advice. From a quick look around tonight, some of that advice seems useful…

… and some not so much.

Last night Google released Google Moderator, a tool to organize “tech talks” or question and answer sessions. It is a free service that Google used internally, but now made public. Matt Cutts said Google calls this application Dory “after the fish who asked questions all the time in Finding Nemo).”

To me, this seems like a more interactive version of Yahoo Suggestions, which is actually a closed tool to just Yahoo feedback. Matt Cutts said Google may be using this tool for future Webmaster Chat sessions. It will allow people to submit questions and then have those involved in the session vote up user submitted questions. Seems like a great organizational tool.

Here is a screen capture:

Maybe I can work on getting this used on a quarterly basis over here. If you are interested in that, do let us know.