http://wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,58028,00.html

Last weekend, British Web developer Lorenzo Wood set up a website called What Britain Thinks. The site poses three conflict scenarios, and asks visitors to vote on which they agree with by sending a text message to a corresponding phone number.

[...]

Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll, said Wood's methodology was "worthless," and that it was the kind of "opt-in" poll seen on numerous websites, albeit more ambitious than many.

"The number of people doesn't matter," Newport said. "Large numbers are no more reliable than small numbers. It is how you get them that matters."

Typically, a national Gallup poll involves questioning 1,000 people nationwide. Respondents are contacted through an automated procedure, based on randomly generated telephone numbers. The method ensures that a representative cross section of the population is polled, according a Gallup spokesman, and that the margin of error is less than 4 percent.

[...]

Newport told the story of George Gallup's rise to fame in the 1936 U.S. presidential election. The leading magazine of the time, Literary Digest, predicted Franklin Roosevelt would lose the election by a landslide, based on a postal poll of millions of its readers.

Gallup took the opposite, controversial view: that Roosevelt would win.

Gallup polled 1,000 voters, selected at random. Newport said Gallup was widely ridiculed, because, like Wood, most people believed that the number of people asked was the most important factor.

Of course, Roosevelt won. Franklin said Literary Digest made the mistake of polling only its readers, who tended to be well-off. The election was held in the middle of the Depression, and Gallup was the only investigator to capture the voting intentions of the poor.

11:11:54 AM  #  

Blogging Goes Corporate. (SOURCE:Jon Husband's Wirearchy)-Publish or perish/blog or die/engage in conversation or die! <quote> The big question in the not-so-distant future may be whether or not companies are willing to allow public discussion to flourish on Weblogs. A failure of nerve on the part of firms determined to stick with more timid, one-way communication may allow other, braver companies to achieve more "mindshare" by engaging the public. As Dornfest told NewsFactor, "Discussion is going to break out. Might as well have it break out where you can see it." </quote> [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
10:17:08 AM  #