AdesBlog.com

In this post, I posted about a new feature in Google Docs - Polls. I had a sample post with the question: “How much do you make money online?”. Interestingly there were total of 40 voters, so I thought I would publish the results.

As you can see below, 57% or 24 people said they are making less than 100% a month. Followed by 10% of people (4 people) making more than $4000 a month. It’s like a real capitalist world huh? Rich gets richer and poor poorer…

Of course, the accuracy of the votes are questionable. Since it was a sample poll, people might have voted just for the sake of testing the poll. Just like your first post on your blog, title “test” body “test test test…” ;)

Google Docs now allows you to create polls. But it’s not so easy or shall I say obvious to create polls in Google Docs. It’s one of those applications that are done from the programmers’ point of view and not the end-users’.

You will have to follow this tutorial to create your first poll. I hope you can remember the steps for your second poll.

I am wondering how difficult would it be to put “Create a poll” link directly in the menu and do the spreadsheet related programming at the backend? Anyway, here is the sample poll I have created below:

Lately AdesBlog has been loading very slow for me (my location: South-East-Asia/Malaysia). At the moment, it’s hosted on goDaddy.com. I did send an email to goDaddy support about it, but they said that everything was fine on their side.

Maybe it has to do with the latest undersea cable cut.

But I see that goDaddy sites are particularly slower than any other sites that are hosted on non-goDaddy hosts. For example, my AdesDesign is hosted on pair.com and it’s working fine. But then again, pair is located in Australia. And it’s not affected by the cable cut.

I do not know how the blog loads for you guys. There is only one way to find out. Please

and let me know how it is loading for you. It will take about 3 seconds to answer, but the info that I get will be invaluable for me. So thank you in advance!

Can you guess what is on the back of these magazines?

Yes, advertisement. But which company?

Hint: If you want to skip the middleman, then you should spend on advertising… a lot!

Answer is in Sashi’s blog.
Did you get it right? If not, which company you guessed? I thought it was 1and1 Hosting Company.

Contest has already started, view details here

I want to know if anyone of AdesBlog readers is interested in free domain name and hosting? If you do please let me know by leaving a comment on this post. Depending on the feedback, I will organize (or not organize) a contest where people will stand a chance to win free domain name + hosting. This contest will be held every week, for 8 weeks consecutively. If it proves to be successful, I might continue it for a longer period.

This is one of the contests that I have in mind (more to come in the future), it is also in line with AdesBlog’s vision (see tagline below the logo).

So what do you think?

Have you ever wondered why poll results on your blog come up overwhelmingly supportive of what you do? This is especially true when your own opinion precedes the poll. e.g. I think this way, how about you? And the results would be in your favor. Why is that?

• Why your readers respond in the way that you want them to respond?
• Does this skew the accuracy of the polls?
• And if it does how the polls should be conducted?

This post will tackle all the above questions.

Readers supporting the author

Here is an example from my own blog, this was the time when I used to write short posts, I asked my readers if they wanted to read short posts or longer posts. I did mention my own preference in the post, which was “writing short posts”. Since the readers read the post first, they did know my preference. So, the answer was of course “write short posts (66.67%)”.

But writing short posts for more than a year didn’t make this blog successful, the success came when I started writing longer posts. If I had followed the poll results, AdesBlog wouldn’t be where it is now. RSS readers would be 50+ instead of 500+.

So why readers support the blogger?

One of the reasons, why your readers are reading your blog in the first place is that, they find your blog interesting. They like what you write, and agree with you on many grounds. At least the majority of your readers do.

And the ones who do not agree, are actually not your core readers. Usually these people do not follow your blog regularly. They just pop in to make some comments and leave. These people eventually stop reading your blog altogether.

So the regular readers of your blog, are people that have similar mindset, similar thinking with you. And it is only natural for these people to support their fellow blogger in his/her endeavor. They are the ones who will tell you to keep going and show support. And that is actually something nice.

But when it comes to polls, this same support can actually give you wrong perception (which can result in unfavorable outcome for you in the future). And that leads us to next question.

Does this (the support of the readers) skew the accuracy of the polls?

Depending on how the poll is conducted, it does. For example, if you let your readers know about your own preference before the poll, then it skews the results.

Like in my case, I did say I want to post short posts, and the poll results reflected my preference.

How the polls should be conducted?

Polls should be conducted in a neutral ground. Of course it depends on you, what you really want to get from the poll results. If you are looking for support to back you up on something, then promoting your own thoughts first (before the poll) wouldn’t be a bad idea after all.

But, if you truly want to know your readers opinion on certain issues, it’s important that you do not reveal your own opinion beforehand. This would eliminate the bias voting that results from readers’ subconscious support towards you that we talked in the first part of this post. And the results that you will get will be the true results!

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