Hot Polling Action

There are times that I think the online polling folks at the P-G are just trying to mess with us... or they're drunk.  I can see either really.

I mean, check this out:

That's sort of like asking: "Would you like an ice cream cone, do you want a zombie to eat your brains, or are you not sure."

("Well, I am lactose intolerant," says the mouth breather.)

I don't think there's anything more useless than an online poll, with maybe the exception of the results of an online poll.

(Our P-G results are in: 75% of respondents say the #1 issue facing America is "the lack of easy access to pornography", while 15% say "the proliferation of captioned cat pictures."  The remaining 10% said "Hold the pickles.")

I can only assume that there's some copy-editor pacing up and down Stanwix Street thinking to himself  "Gotta fill up the margin with something!  Gotta fill the margin up with something!  I know: radial buttons!"  And then there's some executive editor saying, "Yes, that's what our website needs!  More things for the young techno-savvy readers to click on, like their i-Pods or their SuperNintendo Wi-is. By gum!  This will save print media!"

(I suppose the alternative was to expand the obituary column, showing everyone who will not be renewing their subscription to the P-G.)

It's such a stupid idea, that it almost makes me want to put an interactive poll on this blog.

Error 414

For those of you that may be wondering, no, I was not the City employee that tried to rig the kdka.com poll. I have better things to do than to try and finagle some meaningless online poll to the advantage of my current boss. For example... I'm a gardener, an amateur astronomer, a rock climber, a contributor to a nationally syndicated periodical, a musician, a database administrator, a biker, a sometimes architectural student, and Prince of Denmark. This leaves me very little time to do anything other than blog and eat.

To that end, I noticed that this story has gotten some ink in the media, in Pittsburgh and beyond. I think that's kind of curious, actually, considering that (1) the employee didn't seem to do it on company time or at the direction of his superiors and (2) IT'S A FUCKING ONLINE POLL.

Does anyone actually take those online polls seriously? I mean, anyone who's had more than 20 minutes of statistics will tell you that self-selecting respondants are invariably skewed and any poll that doesn't prevent against multiple votes is functionally useless.

Moreover, it's not like the guy hacked into an election machine and overturned thousands of votes for John Kerry in... let's say... Ohio.

But, and here are two quotes from the article:

"As far as I'm concerned, it was all in good fun," the mayor said.

and

"He did it as a private citizen. He's well within his rights as a person," Ravenstahl spokeswoman Alecia Sirk said.

I think those are reasonable responses to the situation at hand. Now, let us further extrapolate as to whether similar responses would have been engendered if the employee had rigged the poll towards DeSantis?

Or let's say that it wasn't a poll that leaned towards DeSantis, but, perhaps... a blog? Would the Mayor's Office be as reasonable if their Bureaucrats happened to be bloggers, moreover, bloggers critical of Pittsburgh Politics and Policies?

But, surely, those are just all in good fun and well within their rights as a person.

Right? RIGHT?