polls

Like polls? Check out Poll Authority, a new poll host that lets you create some really clean looking polls with relative simplicity. It offers many of the features the popular Poll Daddy does but at a lower cost for its pro service which runs at $8 a month. Stripped out are surveys, meaning you're limited to just polls, but it's set up to let you create one in less than a minute which is impressive.

Also included in the pro accounts is vote analysis, which lets you drill down and see where your voters are coming from as … Read more

Its name might be wacky, but some investors with deep pockets think it's the real thing: SodaHead.com, a polling and answers site, announced Wednesday that it has raised $8.4 million in Series B venture funding. The money comes from new lead investor Mission Ventures, as well as existing investor Mohr Davidow Ventures.

The company's previous round, with veteran investor Ron Conway and Tech Coast Angels contributing, had totaled $4.3 million.

SodaHead was founded by Jason Feffer, former vice president of operations at MySpace, and his childhood friend Michael Glazer. Feffer describes the site as "… Read more

The bigger a nation's wealth and carbon footprint, the less its residents care about global warming. That's according to an online survey of 46 countries on every continent by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

The prosperous Dutch appeared the least worried about the prospect of future rising oceans and wild card weather, even though half of the Netherlands lies one meter below sea level. The next least concerned were people in Russia, the United States, Latvia, and Estonia.

"If you take global warming to heart, you understand that you have to sacrifice something," study … Read more

Polls Boutique, which is a play on words from the 1989 Beastie Boys album, is a free polling service that's great for creating simple polls with statistical depth and a great sense of community. Like Polldaddy, which we use extensively on Webware and used for Webware 100 voting this year, and more recently on CNET News.com for the iPod survey, Polls Boutique lets users build and deploy polls to blogs or social networking profiles quickly and easily.

What makes it notable is that you can add all sorts of media to your polls such as photos, audio, and … Read more

Does anybody buying an iPod in 2008 expect to get more than a few years of use out of the thing? My five year old iPod still plays, but I can't get it to work in newer iPod docks or iPod speakers. My iPod is too old.

A good friend of mine plays his 30-year-old Linn LP-12 turntable almost every day. It was an expensive turntable in 1978 when it sold for around $1,200. But he's gotten 30 years of use out of the thing, and even now listens to a lot more vinyl than CD. So … Read more

Our favorite polling service, PollDaddy, just launched Twitter Polls. It's a a quick way to create a poll, which will them embed a link to itself in a Twitter post that goes out under your name.

It's easy to use, and it works as advertised. If you have a lot of Twitter followers, you can use it to start getting results very quickly. My little test poll got about a dozen replies in 20 seconds, which was great.

But we're talking about Twitter, a medium that specializes in the fleeting. After the first batch of votes, my … Read more

The iPhone commercial parody on YouTube with genius filmmaker David Lynch hit the mark for me. His insight about people watching movies on iPhones, I'm paraphrasing--"You think you've seen the movie after watching it on your iPhone, but you'll be cheated. You haven't seen the movie."--could also be applied to music.

Just because you were listening to music while text messaging your boy/girlfriend doesn't mean you've actually heard the music. Exposure to music, art, film, what have you, is not the same as active engagement. It's kind of … Read more

PollDaddy makes a polling engine I like so much that I asked them to provide the technology for the Webware 100 awards. Thanks to them, I couldn't be happier with the way the voting is going. As of this writing, we've recorded more than 980,000 votes. (Go vote!)

Today, the company is taking its technology and opening it up in an interesting way: polls that users create on free accounts are now accessible from a centralized PollDaddy site, and each poll also gets its own page where users can not just participate in it but add comments … Read more

The good news is that there's some competition again for software to edit and catalog raw images, the detailed and flexible file formats from higher-end cameras. The bad news is that anybody buying the software has a harder choice to make.

With the new Aperture now available and Lightroom just celebrating its first birthday, I thought it opportune to survey readers. What would you buy? What would you advise somebody else?

Please vote in the poll here, and share your reasoning in the Talkback section below to enlighten others.

Photographers would be best to think carefully about which software … Read more