Widgets are little rectangles people can easily “embed” into their web pages, social networking profiles and similar. A particularly interesting one was released a few days ago by the news aggregator Newsvine:

ElectionVine is a tiny polling widget that allows the visitors of a website to vote on different US presidential candidates. This wouldn’t be anything new by itself, but what ElectionVine has done is aggregation from all these separate subpopulations into a joint display of political preferences, but also lists the results from individual virtual “polling stations”.

For example, Facebook is not very politically biased, but many other websites are. These polls tell us a lot about the audience of particular web pages (and in reverse about the demographics), they probably don’t tell much about the overall standing. In general, web population hasn’t historically proven representative of that of the whole country. For example, Howard Dean was enormously popular on the Web, yet never made it beyond the primaries. I wonder if it is going to be the same case with Paul and Obama, who win at the web polls yet trail in the conventional surveys (for Rep or Dem). Perhaps it is because of the demographic slant in internet participation, that this BusinessWeek chart nicely displays.

There is some academic work on web-based polling, perhaps worth mentioning is a repository of web-based survey methods papers, WebSM.

As an aside, a few months ago McCain’s MySpace page was using Mike Davison’s (Newsvine co-founder) template without permission. As a prank, Davison then changed the template into a fake message.