Rock the vote with Ask500People

I have just discovered the greatness of the opinion poll . A friend recently showed me the Everybody Votes Channel on the Nintendo Wii, and I was surprised that it was so much fun to spend my time voting in these trivial polls and then trying to guess what everyone else in the world was thinking on the question. After quickly becoming addicted to these opinion polls, I decided that I must find something on the internet that could satisfy my craving for them. In my search I found one of the freshest and most unique sites that I have seen in a long time.

Ask500People is an opinion poll website that says that it is based on the concept of The Wisdom of Crows by James Surowiecki which is that: “diverse, decentralized people voting independently are better at predicting future events or trends than individuals, small groups or even domain experts.”

What the website does is allow from people all over the world to vote in user created polls. The results of the polls are displayed in real time on the website. It appears that the site uses an IP address trace to determine the location of voters. The website displays results, recent votes, and a map of the voters generated using Google Maps. Members of the site can post questions for polls, comment on polls, and promote polls to move them up in the queue. According to the website stats, most people who vote in the polls vote from a third party site by means of a widget on that page.

While Ask500People is like Wii’s Everybody Votes channel in several areas, it’s really more like comparing apples and oranges. The most striking difference is the subject matter of the polls. Everybody Votes polls can be submitted by users, but they are checked by Nintendo so they tend to be pretty light-hearted and appropriate for all audiences. Across the street the users of Ask500People are asking the difficult questions about politics, philosophy, ethics, etc. But of course there are plenty of fun polls in the mix as well.

Let’s face everybody has their own opinion and wants to share it with everybody else, and Ask500People is one best ways that I’ve found to make your thoughts known and to find out what people all over the world are thinking. Now get out there and vote!