We’ve used the Doodle scheduling application for quite some time now. It’s an elegant and easy solution to negotiating the best time for anything from board meetings, to happy hours, to camping trips. Doodle cuts down on all the emails and phone calls it might take to see everyone’s availability, especially for people who don’t share a calendaring system. The polls are easy to set up, and you don’t have to create an account to set up a poll or participate in one. And now you can use Doodle within Facebook. While you can already invite people to events in Facebook, it’s nice to be able to poll people for the best meeting times, as you can with Doodle.
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Lately, I’ve been getting quite a few emails encouraging me to sign a petition supporting various causes. Curious about one of the tools used, I thought, perfect doodad. Today we look at iPetitions. First, great ethics drives iPetitions, they truly believe we can use technology to make the world a better place and through their service enable smaller organizations and non-profits make an impact that they might have otherwise. I’m all for that and I see that lots of social justice organizations have used iPetitions.
The fundamentals of the service include creating a petition from a template of from scratch and getting a url for the petition. You email it to potential signers and they are routed back to iPetitions to sign. Once their data is collected, you can download it and send it to your destination. All of this is free. Of course you can pay iPetitions for various premium services: helping you to host the petition on your servers; sending your signed petitions to your destination and more.
I’ll have to sign off without including a photo. =( It’s taking forever to load & this is the 3rd try…no luck. Next time I need to circulate a petition, it’ll be iPetition for me.
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Who woulda thunk it? Only a year ago I needed no survey widgets. Then questionform and Polldaddy became useful to me. But last week, these two choices were not enough. I needed a widget that could handle more than one question, offered a minimalistic style, and had an option to embed the survey in a small space in an existing web page. Enter SurveyGizmo.
I like the clean interface, the ease of adding new questions and the ability to customize the look and feel. You can start with a blank survey, a copy of one of your previous surveys or with one of several survey templates. The overview screen shows tabs for all the actions you might take with the survey.
SurveyGizmo was developed over a year ago by a small company called Widgix. The free account was perfect for my purposes, although some surveys would surpass the limit of 250 responses per month. There are more powerful features in the paid accounts, for example, piping, skip logic, the ability to trigger mobile test messages from your surveys, and, of course, additional survey responses (up to 50,000).
Widgix built SurveyGizmo plugins for MySpace, WordPress, Wikipages, and Mac Dashboard. They also provide customer support, training and a SurveyGizmo API.
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Evidently the newest craze to sweep academia is doodling. Okay, not doodling exactly, but Doodle scheduling according to a colleague of mine. In an effort to escape their Outlook calendars, some groups are starting to use Doodle to schedule meetings. Doodle is essentially a polling service that has been spun to act as a calendar tool as well as a polling device. While this isn’t the same as having your Outlook calendar on a system where anyone can schedule meetings for you any time of the day or night without your say so, some could see Doodle as a democratizing force in which all potential meeting participants vote on convenient meeting times. Whether this leads to a democratic utopia or to an anarchic riot is probably in the eye of the beholder.
Doodle is definitely a simple tool, which of course, can be both good and bad. It doesn’t track your polls for you, I didn’t see the ability to embed polls, and the graphics aren’t particularly fancy. However, the interface is super-easy to use, and there’s no log in! Oh, and if you’re wondering about the .ch extension - that’s Switzerland for those who like to patronize sites from around the world.
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Ever since we started the blog, I’ve been lobbying my fellow ‘doodad-ers to produce some infodoodads swag. I can’t explain this urge, as I have *mostly* weaned myself from picking up mousepads, pens, bobbleheads, bags and the like at conferences. It might have something to do with the cool customized gear offered by radio shows, bands, and letterpresses.
To find out what y’all think, I used Polldaddy, a free, easy-to-use and award-winning poll creation tool. There are several options for embedding polls in websites, blogs and social networking sites. Polldaddy has a sleek design, great color scheme and graphics along with some really helpful hints about embedding polls. Tracking the polls is simple and you can set an end date. This one is going to expire 11/11/07.
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