It seems that – for President Elect Obama – ‘Change’ will come at the cost of incredible scrutiny.

American newspaper journal Editor & Publisher has posted news on its website of a new addition to feature on the PolitiFact website: The Obameter.

The idea is simple: to keep track of the progress made by the 44th President of the United States on every single policy promise made during his electoral campaign. According to PolitiFact, that’s 510 promises in total.

Three status rankings, ‘stalled’, ‘in the works’ or ‘no action’ will be used to indicate how well these promises are developing. Once the action is deemed to be complete, PolitiFact rates whether the promise has been kept or broken.

Even though the President Elect doesn’t officially take office until tomorrow’s inauguration, already PolitiFact claims two promises have been kept, while one is stalled and nine are ‘in the works’ (including Promise No. 502: ‘Getting his daughters a puppy’).

The Obameter will run in parallel to PolitiFact’s established, Truth-o-Meter, which examines official statements from Washington DC and public official consistency yardstick, the Flip-O-Meter.

The site, developed by the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, won the National Press Foundation’s 2008 online journalism award last month.