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The new feature in this format, which comes nearly two months after a trend-setting YouTube debate, is that the viewer gets to decide what he wants to watch from a selection of video clips. These feature the pack of eight Democratic Party contenders led by senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama answering the same set of questions on the Iraq war, health care and education.
This 'mash-up' style lets the viewer compare their responses back-to-back or completely skip some topics or candidates.
'This is the first debate to offer people who live online what they love about being online - the ability to choose, be interactive and decide for themselves what their experience will be,' said Ms Arianna Huffington, founder of the Huffington Post, which is co-sponsoring the debate, along with Yahoo! and online magazine Slate.
Unlike the earlier CNN/YouTube debate, it will not be broadcast on television but be hosted on Yahoo.
'It's up to the consumers how much they want to consume and how they consume it,' said Mr Scott Moore, Yahoo's senior vice-president of news and information.
Presidential candidates are increasingly turning to such online tools to boost their candidacy. But the jury is still out on the efficacy of the medium in reaching out to and persuading voters.
Today's mash-up debate will be the second time that the Democrats are appearing in a web-based forum, leaving the Republicans to play catch-up.
The candidates vying for the Republican nomination, led by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, will take part in their first YouTube debate slated for Nov 28.
Mr Romney was the most resistant to the YouTube format, in which website users submit videos of themselves asking questions of the candidates
He said he had not liked what he had heard about the Democrat debate, which featured a video of a snowman asking a question about global warming.
'The level of respectfulness was breached. I don't know if it makes sense to have people running for president answering questions posed by snowmen,' Mr Romney said.
Some observers agree with his criticism of the online debate, which has been called the most earthshaking change in communication technology for presidential politics since the Kennedy- Nixon televised debates in 1960.
YouTube accentuates this dynamic towards the trivial, said Mr Jeff Lukens, a conservative blogger.
About the July 23 Democrat debate, he noted: 'In place of a legitimate question about Iraq, we got an emotional father of a fallen soldier insisting we withdraw so that he might not lose another son.'
It has also been pointed out that the YouTube debate attracted 2.6 million television viewers, slightly lower than the number who tuned in a month earlier for a more typical debate.
Experts also say its format was not all that different from the one used for nearly 50 years - candidates on a stage, answering questions selected by the news media in a television broadcast.
University of Iowa elections expert Bruce Gronbeck said: 'Television maintained its position as the dominant framer. It threw the YouTube questions up on the screen and took a picture of them with a camera rather than direct feeding into the broadcast. So the dominant medium tried to stay in control and they picked the questions.'
When The New York Times asked a section of panellists what an all-new debate format could be, Mr Tom Brokaw, a special correspondent for NBC News and the former anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, offered a twist.
'If this is truly the campaign of the new media, candidates should be required to answer questions only on their cellphone, BlackBerry or other personal digital assistant, so we can size up their personal text message codes, ring tones and thumb-typing skills.
'Calls would have to be routed through Mumbai so the candidates could offer their positions on Islamic rage and enquire about their car insurance rates simultaneously.'
