July 2010
7 posts
Looking back at the G20
In a democracy, public policy should reflect public opinion. But even in our industrialized North American society, public policy often does not reflect public opinion.
Taking the global perspective, no one can deny that we do not live in a democratic world. Those who take the decisions that govern the lives of billions are accountable to the mass of humanity very indirectly at best. Their...
Vive la révolution!
There are few we admire more than those who dedicate themselves to revolution, insurrection, and the overthrow of the powerful.
And on July 14, it is always good to remember that the process that began in Paris over two hundred years ago, the creation of universal democracy, is as yet incomplete.
I take the liberty of reposting a quote, from Hilaire Belloc’s The French Revolution:
...
2,000,000 for Max-Dan-Wiz
I wonder if a poll has ever gathered more than two million responses. What’s clear is that with the collaborative approach, two million is a very achievable goal.
The James Patterson team, by embedding an Urtak (over a relatively long period of time, to be sure), and promoting it with a few blog posts, has done just that, creating the largest Urtak by responses.
They now have...
A reader responds
Where there is controversy, there is by definition division of opinion, and AM, a friend of the project, has taken exception to the tone of the two earlier accounts of G20 policing.
What do you think of his argument?
—-
just wanted to write you a brief note about a few of your recent postings. in general, i’m a big fan of your commentary/columns about polling issues. they are...
Another G20 story
From a very good friend, Jeff Carolin:
hi everybody, thanks to everyone who’s been sending moral support. i still feel totally fucked up. i write this with the fear of coopting the voice of the 100s of other people who have been arrested but i just think right now that we need stories getting out there and this is my 3 hour attempt to share my own. i wont pretend that my writing is at peak...
Two heroes of history
In honor of today’s game between Uruguay and Ghana we bring to you two Wikipedia articles.
José Gervasio Artigas, the father of Uruguayan independence, and a man with notably advanced ideas for his time. His influence is perhaps one of the reasons that Uruguay has always been one of the most equitable countries in Latin America.
And Kwame Nkrumah, first president of Ghana, and one of...
Arrested at the G20
Last weekend was one of the worst times in history to try to express one’s opinion in Toronto.
The government of Ontario passed secret laws reducing citizens’ civil rights, and more than 1,000 people ended up arbitrarily detained, locked in cages, or held incommunicado.
All this in response to an outbreak of minor vandalism, that as far as I could tell from my personal experience,...
June 2010
26 posts
Turning lead into gold
Yesterday, we here at Urtak HQ were very interested to learn that for the past year and a half, the Daily Kos blog has been publishing what is almost certainly the fraudulent polling of the Research 2000 firm. And since the Daily Kos was footing the bill for the polls, they’re now suing to get their money back.
Here is an article explaining the problems with Research 2000’s polling:...
Meanwhile, in South Africa
In Toronto this weekend, the leaders of the G20 tell outrageous lies about having the interests of humanity at heart.
The attention of the world, however, is focused on the World Cup in South Africa, the last African country to gain its freedom. No amount of simulation can obscure the fact that we are watching something that is really real.
Today’s match between the USA and Ghana raises...
Urtak: Live from the G20
Toronto is quiet.
But the question of the weekend is:
Do the leaders of the G20 states have too much power?
In fact, that’s the only question in the Urtak so far. As always, please add questions!
Urtak at the G20
Thinking about Gen. McChrystal
Yesterday, Barack Obama fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal for his bizarre indiscretion.
FOX News ran the following web poll:
205,283 responses and 4346 comments later, we learn that 67% of the respondents believe Obama should have forgiven McChrystal. And nothing else.
One question garnered huge response, but we know nothing about who they are. That massive amount of engagement was channeled...
100. 200. 400?
We are pleased to announce that today we have reached the milestone of 200 Urtaks in the public directory. That means 200 collaborative polls that anyone can study to gain new insights into how people think.
It took us more than a year to get to 100 Urtaks in the directory. The second 100 has taken three months.
Our sincerest thanks to everyone who has participated. Onward and upward!
Do...
A response from The Toronto Star
Last week, I wrote an article for The Faster Times challenging the Toronto Star’s reporting of a Toronto mayoral election poll.
Here is the response of The Star’s Public Editor to my article:
Dear Marc:
I have now had opportunity to speak to David Rider and City Editor Graham Parley about your concerns.
As you may know, David has also blogged about some of the issues you have...
Public Opinion - From xkcd
http://xkcd.com/756/
No one has ever called us gamines
Some Urtaks are very large. Others are smaller. But what makes the collaborative poll more interesting than any other is always the quality of the questions.
The Gamine is a blog that defies categorization. Its content is a confluence of art, fashion, and lifestyle, with a focus on how these are experienced in New York. I always find it to be attractive, insightful, and unexpected.
But of...
Made in America
While watching yesterday’s World Cup disaster, Aaron and I had the good fortune to catch this Dodge Challenger ad, starring Robin Williams as George Washington.
After teaching the limeys another lesson (when will they learn?), the narrator reminds us that, “Here’s a couple of things America got right: Cars, and freedom.” This is the typical American modesty.
The...
Live from New York!
On Saturday, I had the good fortune to be invited to give a short talk at NYC Startup Weekend. NYCSW is a very cool event where over a hundred people come together to create and launch new ideas over the course of just one weekend.
I talked about how Aaron and I took Urtak from an idea in our minds to the dynamic product that it is. I also shared some of our next steps for the future....
6,000,000
Six million responses is a big deal.
It took us less than seven weeks to gain our last million responses, our fastest ever.
Hundreds of thousands of people have participated in our project to create both a resource and a technology for collaborative public opinion research.
With a small group of dedicated individuals, and a much larger group of friends and allies, we have shown that...
Bad Polling in Toronto
From The Faster Times:
This morning, readers of the Toronto Star woke up to a new fact. On page GT1, Urban Affairs Bureau Chief David Rider writes that Rob Ford, the right-wing populist candidate for the mayoralty of Canada’s largest city has caught up to George Smitherman, the centrist candidate of Toronto’s liberal establishment.
How does The Star know? It’s simple. Lorne Bozinoff,...
Quick Hit
From the Meta-Urtak, the Urtak about the Urtak Project (it’s in the right sidebar).
Do you personally know a member of the Urtak team?
Right now, it’s 61% yes. I wonder where it will be in 30 days. Remind me if I forget.
What is Public Opinion?
Public opinion is so much more than the approval ratings of politicians or election prognostication.
For anyone who has had the good fortune to travel to Argentina, it is clear that some of the greatest polarization can be around so things besides politics: the proper way to cook a steak, the greatest tanguero, and of course feelings about the country’s eternal Number 10, Diego Armando...
“A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the...”
Urtak is part of The Faster Times!
We first heard about The Faster Times last summer. As they say, the journalism collective is “a new kind of newspaper for a new kind of world.” You can read what the New York Times (The Slower Times) has to say about them, here.
They’ve since published eight of my articles about public opinion, and I hope to contribute many more in the future.
But what is even more exciting...
Survey as manipulation
As we do and will continue to repeat, when the power to ask questions is in the hands of the few, opinion research can easily be an attempt to manipulate public opinion, instead of reflecting it.
This fascinating image, of a “Republican Census,” designed to look like a government document. The purpose is either to infiltrate the faulty premises of the questions more easily into the...
A surprise visit!
Look who came by HQ: Our friend and ally Lena Chen!
Creator of a wonderful Urtak!
And what are its most significant questions? Of course I will share them with you!
Are you a man?
Have you ever lived outside of the US?
Do you blog?
Do you live with a significant other?
Have you ever cheated on a significant other?
A big thank you to Lena and her devoted readers for creating this...
In The Faster Times again
Our blog post from yesterday in The Faster Times.
Check it out!
http://thefastertimes.com/publicopinion/2010/06/08/colombias-other-state/
The Other State
Colombia is in the middle of an electoral process that is leaving that nation’s liberals completely demoralized. Fooled by the alchemists’ tricks of Invamer, Datexco, and Napoleon Franco, they believed that the candidate of the Green Party, former Bogotá mayor Antanas Mockus, was on the verge of victory.
The results of the first round of the presidential election showed that...
100x1000
Earlier this week I wrote about a big milestone: every Urtak in the top ten has more than 100,000 responses.
But I may have overlooked a bigger milestone. For the first time, there are more than 100 Urtaks with more than 1000 responses.
In an earlier post, I wrote about the significance of getting 1000 responses. It is not only very hard to do with traditional top-down polls, it is also quite...
Five Questions: Israel
Few issues in international affairs rouse more passion than the nature of the relationship between the State of Israel and its neighbors.
On Monday, the Israel Defence Forces raided a blockade-running convoy to Gaza while it sailed in international waters, resulting in many deaths, and an explosion of sentiment worldwide.
Turks and Israelis protest in front of each others’ embassies. No...
Homepage adjustment
In the interest of making Urtak creation even easier and more intuitive, this morning we’ve made a small adjustment to our homepage.
Can you tell what it is?
Mashable's Colossal Excellence
Last Thursday, we were delighted to see Urtak make its first appearance on Mashable, maybe the world’s leading tech blog. The article, “5 Ways To Turn Your Traffic Into Valuable User Data,” puts us in a group with Hunch, Formspring, PollDaddy, and UserVoice, and we feel we compared very favorably.
Best of all, an Urtak was embedded into the body of the article itself, and as a...
Top Ten is an elite club
This morning we woke up to the beautiful fact that the exceptional ZA NEWS Season 2 Urtak, from South Africa’s favorite political satire, ZA News, had crossed the magic barrier of 100,000 responses.
This means that every single one of the top ten largest Urtaks has more than 100,000 responses, resulting in a very aesthetically pleasing first page of the Urtak Directory.
One day soon,...
Davis vs. O'Donnell
For people who follow the New York City tech scene, Mark Davis and Charlie O’Donnell are familiar names. They are venture capitalists and some of the more prominent VC bloggers around. We’ve met them and like them both, and we like them even better because they both have Urtaks up and running on their sites!
Get Venture (Mark’s blog) and This is going to be BIG!...
May 2010
16 posts
How to customize your Urtak
At Urtak, we love orange and blue so much we’ve made those the default widget colors. However, other options are possible. Though we haven’t yet built an interface for changing colors, it’s relatively simple to do, as long as you have some basic HTML skills.
The first thing to do is to find the style section of your page.
Then, insert the following piece of code into your...
Fighting fires: Solving an embed problem
If you have access to the source code of your blog, you should be able to embed Urtak on your page.
However, some publishing services, even though they let you write code to your page, run the code through what is called an HTML validator, which makes sure that everything added conforms to that platform’s standards.
We came across this problem because an Urtak creator wrote to us and...
Can this man be the next President of Colombia?
Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia’s hard-line former minister of defense is the establishment’s choice to be his nation’s next president.
Colombia’s human rights record is one of the worst in Latin America, and under Santos’ watch, the Colombian Army perpetrated the terrible crimes of the “false positive” scandal, where as many as thousands of innocent...
CBC uses Urtak. Why don't you?
Over the past weeks, we’ve been very happy to see Urtak in use on the CBC website, at http://www.cbc.ca/smartshift/.
Canada’s national broadcaster has helped us to learn about Canada’s Water Crisis, Canada’s Health Care, and now, Canada’s Food.
What will they think of next? I am hoping it is Canada’s greatest exports!
Denzel, do you hear the people sing?
We are very fortunate to have had James Patterson’s team as early adopters of the Urtak technology. The record-breaking, best-selling American author has a dedicated fan base, and as our Top Ten shows, they have used Urtak to learn a great deal about each other.
Patterson’s Alex Cross series has already been turned into two films, Kiss the Girls, and Along Came a Spider, both...
Have you heard of?
The general interest Urtak is the first Urtak ever created, and lives on the Urtak.com home page. It has by far the most questions of any Urtak, with over 16,000. It would take quite a while to answer them all.
Today, I am highlighting several questions that individual participants asked to better gauge their understanding of the community - they all take the form - “Have you heard...
How to Feast
Hungry, a friend and ally of the Urtak project, recently asked us to take a closer look at the Urtak (Are you a feaster?) that he has embedded on his site, Feast.com.
Hungry has owned this excellent domain for many years, and is wondering what to do with it. While most of the participation in Are you a feaster? was happening, Feast.com had nothing up and running except a few attractive images...
Our South African friends
Here is an image of the traffic to urtak.com from South Africa over the last month. Unfortunately, since the vast majority of participants interact with Urtak through the embedded application, we can’t show the location of everyone who has participated, but this smaller selection is still quite interesting.
As should come as no surprise, most visits come from South Africa’s three...
Limitation as feature
Pete Sampras began his tennis career with a dependable two-handed backhand. He had a defensive style, hanging back by the baseline, and not making too many errors. With this game he was already an excellent player, but he was not dynamic enough to achieve his goal of winning Wimbledon.
He switched to a one-handed backhand, a shot that can be exploited by the very best. What could have been a...
Urtak is on CrunchBase
Yes, the good news is here - we have been added to CrunchBase - TechCrunch’s database of web startups. That anyone can edit.
Here’s the short description of Urtak:
Urtak is a provider of collaborative web polls.
Urtak’s invention of the collaborative poll means that every participant in an Urtak poll can not only answer questions, but also ask them. By embedding an Urtak poll on...
Two cool usecases
Here are two very interesting ways that bloggers have been using Urtak technology.
The first is from Chocri - makers of delicious and customizable chocolate. You get to be Willy Wonka. They’ve used Urtak to find out your chocolatey opinions!
Here is their Urtak:
Chocolate
Another is one I just came across today - on Hot Foot, a New York Mets fan blog. There are only a few questions,...
1K for @heyamberrae
Five days ago, friend and ally of the Urtak project @heyamberrae put an Urtak up on her blog, and today, after learning many interesting things about her readers (for example, start-up workers tend to be more upset with Obama) her Urtak will collect its 1000th response.
1000 is a huge number. If Amber would have wanted to get 1000 responses from a survey research company, she would have had a...
New face in the Top Three
We have been blown away by the engagement that lasillavacia.com has seen with Urtak. They are averaging about 60K responses per week, and that kind of participation means that they have dethroned ZA News Season 1 as the third largest Urtak.
So, our top three now has a Spanish-language member. The collaborative approach has global potential…
More milestones
The last three months have been kind to Urtak. We’ve seen more people using our technology, more responses coming in per day, and many many more Urtaks being created.
We simplified the Urtak creation process in February, and we’ve seen the number created explode by almost 10x since then.
Today Urtak number 2500 was created. Hooray!
Likewise, the number of responses per day seems...
X-TAB how-to
One of the things that makes Urtak technology so powerful, is that not only are all the results to all the Urtaks available to the public, but any two results in an Urtak can also be cross-tabulated.
This means an exponential increase in the available information from a given Urtak, which already generates more data than any other web polling solution. So yeah, it can be a bit of an overload.
...
Most significant
If you have used the learn interface available at every Urtak page on urtak.com, you have seen that it is very easy to sort questions by Most cared, Most divided, Most agreed, and a few others. This is a quick way to make sense of the giant amount of data that the collaborative approach demonstrates.
To make things even simpler, we are developing the idea of “Most significant”...
April 2010
14 posts
Has Urtak created the largest survey of all time?
The general interest Urtak is the first Urtak poll ever created. We had the conviction that the best way to find out what people think is to let them ask the questions themselves. Certainly, we have found that with the Urtak approach, it’s really easy to gather a huge amount of opinion information.
Which brings is to the question of the day, is the general interest Urtak the largest survey...