Would you let your children drop out of public school to competitively play Video Games? If you have no children, would you expect your parents to support such a decision?
For those unfamiliar with the story of Blake Peebles, here is the short summary: 16 year old plays Guitar Hero, gets really good, wins prizes in various competitions, contemplates dropping out of High School for competitive gaming, his parents support his decision of his new found gaming career choice.
For those that play video games, this sounds like a beautiful Cinderella story, but is it all that it’s cracked out to be?
Competitive gaming is a growing trend by itself, and players can earn as much as $80,000 a year, but those are a few and are in need of rare granted sponsorships. For others, they can make an average of $25,000 a year with a lot of traveling, accomodations and daily needs eating into that salary.
We are not ignoring the actual problem of education…what about the children’s studies? Well, Blake’s parents did not give up on that, he is simply receiving home studies and actually improved his grades along with practice time alotted for gaming.
This particular poll received thousands of votes, along with many comments that varied from complete and utter support of Blake and his dream to disbelief and anger at such a “stupid” decision. It seems that people equal video games with stupidity. Is that so? That would have to be determined by another intriguing poll…next time.
Work on the new homepage is still underway. Red-eyed, scruffy developers crowd the water cooler as the race enters its last phase. We’ve been playing with the monster for a week now, and we like it a lot. It will certainly make an impace on the site.
One dilemma we still have, and wish to share with you, is the Obsessive Pollsters dilemma: as you can see, the bottom of our new homepage is dedicated to top users. It includes the following weekly charts:
Top Voters: users who voted on most polls that week.
Top commentators: users who commented the most that week.
Popular pollsters: users who have created the most popular polls that week.
Obsessive pollsters: users who have created the most polls that week.
We’re not 100% sure about that last term. What do you think? Should we keep calling it Obsessive pollsters? Or should we change it to something else? got any specific ideas? Let us know.
Since we’re all geeks here at Polls Boutique, nothing makes us happier than seeing our poll widget appear in two of the web’s best gaming blogs: PS3 Fanboy, and PSP Fanboy.
Using a Polls Boutique poll is a great way to get feedback from customers and people you work with. Just setup a poll and send it to your client and/or peer. You can also embed the poll on your company’s website or intranet. It’s a great way to get instant feedback on your service.
We put polls Boutique on the iphone and the experience is fantastic. It was so fun voting on polls using the iphone, we had to make a little video out of it:
We’ve been trying to figure this one out for a long time:
When we started pollsb.com, we wanted to try a social connection model that’s similar to flickr and twitter’s: a one way connection in which anyone can add you as a pollster and get your polls on their pollster feed.
Lately though, we’re thinking about a social network model where one user “requests” friendship from the other, and has to be confirmed to be his friend (like on myspace and facebook).
We’d love to get some feedback on the subject. And so, we’ve made a poll about it:
“Polls Boutique makes it easy to add multimedia to your polls. You can add images, audio, or video clips. You can write introductions to your polls and inlcude hyperlinks. And you can share your polls with others either through the Polls Boutique web site, or through a widget that you can embed on any web page. You can view the results of your poll at the Polls Boutique site, complete with some basic demographic info, since anyone who signs up for Polls Boutique needs to give up their location, gender and age.”
They’ve also uploaded a poll comparing us to another online poll website. We really like the results:
“Polls Boutique lets you build and deploy a poll to your blog or social networking profile quickly and easily. What makes it notable is that you can add all sorts of media to your polls like photos, audio and video clips. It’s also got some really great statistical analysis that lets you see the make-up of your voters, both in gender and age. There are also options to drill down by specific age group, geographical location, and even astrological sign (we’re not counting votes from Sagittarius voters in the poll below–sorry).”
It took us a while to post this blog. Too long, if I may say so. It’s not like we didn’t see the need to start one: blogs are such central pillars in today’s web development process. The truth is, we were so busy creating Polls Boutique, that we didn’t get around to doing it. And here we are, 9 months since we launched our Alpha, starting our own blog! Wooohoooo!
Polls Boutique is a tiny company. Seven people all in all, front to back. You can see almost all of us here (note the funny hats):
Our vision for Polls Boutique is to create a social destination that revolves around people’s opinions. A way to meet people who have the same (or the opposite) opinions as yours, a way to learn about your friends, make new friends and even discover your own opinions, through voting.
We also want to let people use our poll tool everywhere on the web: on blogs, social networks, websites, and message boards. And we want to let people be able to make poll any way they want: with full customization and the ability to embed any rich media (video, audio, links etc). More on that in the next post, where we’ll be discussing our new poll widget.
