Online windows into what the world is thinking

We may all be a bit sick of opinion polls at the moment, but if you do get the sudden urge to take the world’s pulse it has never been easier to do so, Springwise reports.

Two new online polling sites called Ask500People and BuzzDash can give you a snapshot of the world’s mood on just about any question you choose.

Ask500People, as the name suggests, allows you to run a quick poll of 500 people – although at the moment it is beta mode, so you can actually only ask 100 people. It runs only yes/no questions and gathers votes on its own website and through widgets on thousands of other sites. On average it takes less than 15 minutes to get the requisite 100 responses, and the website produces a report that gives you the rough geographic location of the people who answered the poll.

For a business to ask any questions it chooses, Ask500People charges between $US100 and $US500, but you can also lob a question in for free. Website users will then vote on whether they think the question is interesting, and if it attracts enough support, it will go out as a poll.

BuzzDash, on the other hand, takes a bit longer to get responses in – usually some months – and unlike Ask500People the site editors decide which questions go up.

Visitors to BuzzDash can choose to answer questions from categories like Entertainment and Business & Finance, and can also create “buzzbites” to publish on their own websites, asking their own visitors the questions they want answers to. BuzzDash focuses on coming up with interesting questions that people will want to come to the site to answer – in effect, polling as entertainment.