Googling ‘poll software‘ or ‘blog poll’ is an exercise in futility, which has got to be frustrating for beginning bloggers who want to incorporate a poll into their blog. That’s because, quite frankly, most hosted polling solutions are terrible.

It’s not that there aren’t plenty of poll applications littering searches (and the accompanying adsense ads) — it’s just that they appear to have been built by people who didn’t test them on different browsers and don’t care about the aesthetics of something that will ultimately go on someone else’s site.

Another issue is the fact that the overwhelming majority of hosted poll applications out there, such as Quimble, dPolls, Poll Genius, etc., do not allow you to create anything other than the simplest of polls — ones in which users select only one answer out of all possible options. (Zoho Polls is an exception in that it lets you create polls where folks rate various items with stars, like you’d rate a seller on Ebay.)

What’s breathtaking about that oversight is that it completely ignores the (admittedly somewhat obscure) discipline of voting mathematics. (There’s an excellent article on the subject of voting mathematics at Science News that will leave you shaking your head that any election system in the world is based on simple plurality voting.)

Imagine for instance that you want to ask your readers — or even just a select group of insiders — to help you choose one name out of a roster of three for a new blog or feature that you’re launching. Just as in previous elections in the U.S., with simple plurality voting (in which voters can only cast their vote once, for a single candidate), it’s possible that the third item on the list will split the vote for what could have been everyone’s favorite horse in the race, if you had used a more sophisticated voting system.

That’s why it was so gratifying to discover that PollDaddy, which is extremely easy to set up, works on every browser I tested it in, and even looks good, allows for what’s known as “approval voting” — that is, voting in which users can simply check off all of the options that they like. Some scientific societies use the approval voting system that PollDaddy allows for their elections, and research into the mathematics of voting shows that in all cases it is better at getting voters what they want than simple plurality voting.

Not only will this give you a more reliable result when asking outsiders to vote on more than two options, but PollDaddy also allows you to create more complicated polls (such as reader surveys that include gender, age, location, HHI, etc.) rather than having to create a separate poll for each of those questions. Reader surveys are something that is widely used in the professional media world (advertisers want to know what demographic they’re selling to on your site) that could help a dedicated blogger target his or her content, or even just survey his or her users to find out what kinds of posts they like best.

That said, what post on polling software would be complete without a poll? Let’s try a simple user survey — this will help the bloggers on this site get to know our readers a little better, and it’s completely anonymous.

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One of the reasons that fudged statistics and even outright lies have a tendency to spread rapidly through the mainstream media is that the mainstream media does something that the blogosphere is only just waking up to: re-writing competitors’ stories without doing additional reporting.

In other words, one way to rapidly and cheaply generate content is to copy other outlets’ facts, narratives, even conclusions, and re-write them as if they were your own. Crazy? Unethical? Then why do so many respected blogs — and even Google News — get away with it?

While it’s illegal to plagiarize someone else’s work, it’s not illegal to re-write the same news that someone else has already reported. That means that, especially online, there really isn’t any way to protect the investment someone has put into doing original reporting on a subject — this is bad for people who make news, and good for everyone who is simply aggregating the fruits of their labor.

When a story is re-reported, sometimes the source material is credited, and sometimes it’s not. But the fact is, if your summary of someone else’s story is good enough, hardly anyone will bother to visit the original even if you credit it. That means you get all the traffic. Here’s an example:

One of the things that big blogs like Engadget and BoingBoing get away with all the time is writing their own version of someone else’s story. (This is only natural — they function as aggregators more than primary sources of news, though to its credit Engadget does significant amounts of original reporting.)

BoingBoing does this to Scientific American (my employer) all the time, and, despite BoingBoing’s huge readership, their linking to us at the end of their posts based on our stories generates only negligible traffic for us. Probably because, well, why by the cow when you can get the milk for free? Which is to say, they do a good job of summarizing our articles and clipping out the best bits — their short, pithy rewrites make our full write-ups look unappetizingly large and cumbersome by comparison.

On only one occasion, I discovered that I could turn the tables on these aggregator-blogs. By some miracle, my blog post on, of all things, an Engadget post ended up getting on Reddit and Buzzfeed instead of the original Engadget post. I like to think it’s because I managed to give an otherwise boring article a punchy title:

Details on Taser’s XREP electric shotgun shell emerge (original Engadget piece)

Does this look like a nonlethal weapon to you? (My remix of the original Engadget piece — now with a politically-charged headline!) — Buzzfeed, Reddit

When re-reporting works… and when it doesn’t

I realize that this flies in the face of most of the prevailing thinking on what drives traffic to a blog, which holds that original content is the key to building readership. This is true if you’re posting once a day; in that case simply re-reporting other’s work would get you nowhere fast. But there is another way.

Blogs that function as true aggregators of information are updated at least a half-dozen times a day. Often they are written by people who would be writing for a living anyway, for example Om Malik of GigaOM media.

Another example is Hank Green of EcoGeek.org. EcoGeek is primarily an aggregator of other folks’ content — but because Hank is so good about keeping it fresh, and because he’s been so savvy in a number of other ways, his site has become a destination, like BoingBoing or TechCrunch. The result is that, with all apologies to Hank, he can get away with writing posts that are more or less identical to their source material, for example the EcoGeek post about solar chargers vs. the Good Clean Tech post from which he drew his facts and image.

These sort of blogs — call them news aggregators — are no different than, say, Google News. Their value to the reader comes from the curatorial function carried out by their authors — this is all the news that one person (or a computer algorithm) thinks you need to know about. The original source of the information does not matter, as long as you present it in a stylish, well written, and most of all targeted manner. Good writing or simply deep knowledge of a subject plus an obsessive interest in (and the spare time available for) covering a subject area completely are the primary requirements of running a blog of this kind.

*And by stealing, I mean aggregating.

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With more and more mainstream outlets launching blogs and taking down the paywalls around their news, what’s a blogger to do?

As this trend accelerates, and these sites get wise to the traffic and revenue generating potential of service journalism (which is all a blog like Engadget really is, anyway) there is a very real potential that they will start to climb the search engine ranks and siphon off some of the traffic that the small fry have been relying on for their revenue.

Here’s a quick survey of the changing competitive landscape:

Recently Made Their Content Free:

• The Economist
• CNN.com’s Pipeline video-news service

Will make their content free:

• New York Times
• Wall Street Journal

And here’s what you can do to fight back:

1. Write an ebook

If the big boys are moving to free, why not outflank them by charging for your content? It might sound crazy, but a well-written ebook has a lot of potential utility for a reader:

• unique content — often a ‘how-to’
• a perceived value proportional to effort put in
• has specific utility – e.g. Take Control Books
• the psychological notion that, as a .pdf, an ebook has some physicality – some tie to our old notion of books

2. Make sure your niche is unique — or too small to be of value to a larger company

Sometimes blogs feel like the 10,000 different industry newsletters that we never knew we needed to be reading. As readership fragments and people become more comfortable building their own diet of news via RSS readers, Google homepages and sheer habit, niches will continue to proliferate. Large media companies simply don’t have the desire or resources to pursue them all.

3. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em

Don’t think of it as the last refuge of the coward — rather, it’s a recognition that the coming years will see a lot of consolidation in the blogosphere. In fact, it’s already happening, as recently-flipped videoblog WallStrip illustrates. If you’re already building a strong brand through your domain, don’t be surprised if a blog network or other mainstream outlet comes knocking. Or you could always be proactive and offer your services to them directly.

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Moore’s law is at it again, and the latest sacred cow to be slaughtered by this force of nature is the notion that a laptop need weigh about 8 pounds and do everything that a desktop can do.

OK, so the notion of an ultra-portable PC isn’t exactly new–hardware manufacturers have been chipping away at it for decades, with mixed success. In an era when smart phones can read word documents and even my Nintendo DS can browse the web, do we really need a teeny-tiny computer-ish thing that’s missing some critical features but not others?

The answer is a resounding yes, and has been since the TRS-80 Model 100 became one of the best selling PCs of its era.

This now-forgotten device, a favorite with journalists, was arguably the world’s first ultra mobile (it came out in 1983). It ran for 20 hours on 4 AA batteries, had a full keyboard and modem, and included a word processor, date book and a terminal–and, 20 years later, is still in use today.

The Palm Foleo

Enter Jeff Hawkins’ (the man who invented the Palm) Foleo. There are other subnotebooks of similar dimensions, such as Dell’s X1, which also weighs 2.5 pounds but has a bigger screen — 12.5 inches vs. the Foleo’s 10.

But the X1 cost $1500 and the Foleo costs $500. How’s that possible?

The real innovation here is stripping out Windows, which not only saves the manufacturer a couple hundred in licensing fees to Redmond, but also allows the laptop to be speedy despite much more modest specs, which include a slower processor and a flash-based rather than spinning-platter hard drive.

Despite some truly cool features — including instant-on and instant application switching — the Foleo has a number of drawbacks, most of which come down to marketing issues — seems that if Palm would just admit it’s a laptop and start equipping it as such (software wise) rather than insisting that it’s a “smart phone companion” folks might see it in a different light (I for one might buy it anyway just as soon as the linux hackers have a chance to turn it into a more versatile machine).

The Foleo’s heart is in the right place–unfortunately for Palm, the folks who might actually deliver on Hawkins’ dream are all the other companies who are going to be coming out with ridiculously cheap ultra-portable, linux-powered laptops in the coming year. The contenders:

The Asus EeePC

The fabulous laptop with a craptacular name, the Asus EeePC is my pick for runaway sales and market dominance, IF the interface and bundled software doesn’t suck. (That’s a big if.)

For the same price as an X-box ($200 or $300) you get a fully-functioning laptop (Intel 900 MHz Pentium M, 7 or 10 in. display, 512 MB Ram and 4-16 GB flash hard drive) that weighs 2 pounds. No fuss, no muss – that’s it – the computer for the rest of us, or at least anyone who wants portability with the least amount of hassle possible. When someone finally succeeds at creating the iPod of go anywhere, do-anything PCs that fulfills all the basic functions we need (web browsing, e-mail, etc.) it will look like this. Expect to see the first models some time this year.

Via NanoBook

Also weighing in at 2 pounds, the Nanobook has the advantage of running Windows (if you can call that an advantage on an under-powered portable that will probably strain under the bloated code-base). It’s even more than the Foleo, however, at $600. Great if you’re married to Windows — and science knows most of us are. No reason you couldn’t strip out Vista and replace it with Ubuntu, though…

Anyone else have a favorite ultra-portable, or reasons why they would or wouldn’t want to get their hands on one? (Anyone else miffed that Apple hasn’t entered this field yet?)

Update: How could I forget, the grand-daddy of them all, The One Laptop Per Child project

Started by MIT in order to deliver an inexpensive, tough laptop to kids in the developing world, will be selling to consumers, after all. This could be the most innovative machine on this list, given its unique features.

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It’s rare for Google to invest in a company–usually they just buy them outright–but Meraki is a rather exceptional company.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with the CEO of Meraki a couple months back when he paid a visit to the New York offices of Scientific American, where I work. Prior to this particular press junket, Meraki hadn’t bothered to advertise–which, incredibly, hadn’t stopped their technology from metastasizing into 1,000 installs on every continent on Earth (yes, even Antarctica) solely by word of mouth.

What Sanjit Biswas, CEO of Meraki, described to me that afternoon is, I’ve come to believe, potentially revolutionary in its simplicity.

Put briefly, Meraki has created a cheap and reliable way for even completely nontechnical people to easily set up a wireless mesh network of virtually any scale, in which up to 50 users share a single connection to the internet while still being able to browse the web at comfortable speeds.

These networks have been used by non-profits to bring wireless connectivity to low-income communities and apartment complexes, but given their built-in ability to gate access and collect login fees, they could just as easily be used to turn anyone with a few hundred extra bucks into a wireless internet service provider.

Here’s how it works

Meraki’s primary product is the Mini, a rectangular box about the size of a bloated phone charger.

When plugged into an existing internet connection, it behaves like a wireless router. When in range of one of its mates (but not connected to the internet) it acts as a repeater, amplifying and re-transmitting the signal of neighboring repeater and/or router Minis. When plugged into the ethernet port on a computer, it can act as a wireless modem (in order to act in place of a wireless card, since many of the PCs in Meraki’s target market are in the developing world, and may not have wireless capability built-in).

The Mini is $50 US, and it’s commodity hardware–nothing special. What makes the Meraki Mini-powered mesh network special is the firmware burned into the flash memory of every Mini. This firmware is continually updated by Meraki, by remote, for free, for life. This software is the smarts that allows the mesh network to route packets efficiently–imagine a web of interconnected nodes plugged into DSL modems, cable internet connections, or simply wall outlets, spread across a neighborhood, housing complex, or town. (Here’s a map of one of the bigger installs, in San Francisco.)

Efficiently routing traffic through a mesh network with even a few dozen nodes is potentially a huge problem, mathematically, so the maintenance of the efficiency of these networks is maintained in part by Meraki’s remote servers–basically all the hard computational grinding has been offloaded to Meraki’s computing cloud.

My own experiences with Meraki

All that aside, my own personal experiences with the Meraki have been nothing short of remarkable in terms of how little maintenance my own small network has required.

I live in so-called brownstone Brooklyn, where four-story row houses stand cheek by jowl with one another. My landlord has a wireless connection which he lets me share, except that it’s transmitted by a wireless router three floors above me, so the signal strength where I am, on the first floor, is abysmal. So I got him to agree to let me replace his wireless router with a Meraki Mini, and I bought a second one to put in the one spot in my apartment where I can usually see the signal from upstairs. I plugged both in to the wall (and the router Mini into a DSL modem), logged into meraki.net to register the network, and voila — I instantly had a two-node mesh network with gated access manageable through a web-based dashboard–which also provides me with everyone’s usage patterns and other geektacular data.

I’ve been thinking of attaching another Mini to my back window (they come with suction cups) to retransmit the signal to my back yard, for those days I feel like working outside, and here’s where the bit about becoming your own Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) comes in:

If I wanted to, I could also stick a weatherproof, $99 US outdoor Mini on my back fence. One model is even solar powered, so I wouldn’t have to run an extension cord out to it.

Since it’s outdoors and there’s nothing but wooden fences and a few trees back there, this router would probably have an effective range of about 500 feet, or enough to encompass all the apartment buildings behind me and most of the houses on my small block. Getting permission from neighbors down the street to stick additional solar-powered Minis to their back fence would allow me to effectively cover dozens or even hundreds of residential units. (In New York, the population density is quite high.)

I could then modify the splash page that anyone attempting to log into my Meraki network sees — that’s easy, and can be done through the aforementioned web-based dashboard — to say that the network they’re attempting to access is the local indy wireless network, and if they’d care to fork over a certain number of dollars a month, they could use it to get access to the net. (Meraki handles all billing and access issues and takes a small cut.)

Granted, charging a bunch of my neighbors $10 a month (or whatever I think the market will bear) to use my DSL connection isn’t going to make me rich–but if enough of them sign up it could at least pay for my access and maybe leave me a little bit of passive income after that. And all I had to do was something I enjoy anyway… a little bit of tinkering with no technical knowledge required. Perfect for my geek-inclined but not terribly frustration-tolerant disposition.

I’m curious if anyone reading has had any experiences of their own with setting up Meraki mesh networks, or if they live in areas that might be suitable for these kinds of applications. (Also, feel free to ask any questions in the comments; there are quite a few details I left out of this post in the interest of brevity.)

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