Stuff like Condorcet is for elections (choosing a single winner in some high stakes question). Polls on discussion sites are more to get a feel for user opinion. Rather than more sophisticated polls I think simplerones are needed. Two things I find missing from many web poll systems:
- Multi-question polls: you want to ask several questions (age, handedness, hair color, favorite programming language) in the same poll, and be able to record each answer, so you can find out how many left-handed blond users in their thirties prefer Perl. The different ways of concocting substitutes for this (involving making one giant question that's a cross product of all the questions you really want to ask) are ok in theory but stink in practice.
- Surveys. I usually like these much better than polls. Diaryland does a pretty nice job of this, though more improvements are possible. Surveys differ from polls because the answers are free text, not check boxes. You ask a bunch of questions (your age, your hair color, what was the first interesting program you wrote, your favorite language) and the answer for each one is a free text field. Viewers can then see all the answers for a given question, or can see the entire set of answers for a particular user.
|
