Monday, June 25, 2007

My pollmappr poll so far

Just for a little fun, and to try out pollmappr from FortiusOne, I asked the question "Should Peter Batty consider 'going to the dark side' and working somewhere in the ESRI universe?". You can see the latest results (and/or vote) in the box below (or click here if you can't see a box).

At the time of writing, the scores are:
  • 42 votes (54%) for "Yes, it is your destiny"
  • 25 votes (32%) for "No, don't do it!"
  • 11 votes (14%) for "Don't know, don't care, who is Peter Batty?"
Where are all you Intergraph and Smallworld voters, I ask?!

Anyway, when I went to look at the spatial distribution of the votes, I was a little disappointed to find that only a small proportion appeared on the map, and all of these were in the US, so I surmised that pollmappr is currently only mapping votes from the US. I checked in with Sean Gorman at FortiusOne and he confirmed that this was the case currently, but he said that the next release will show the results as point locations with a heat map and will not need Google Earth for display, and that they will also become data sets in GeoCommons and will be mashable. So actually on re-reading his email he didn't quite answer my question :), but I will put my vote in for support for global data in future!

Anyway, here's a screen shot of the "yes" votes at the time of writing:

Should Peter Batty go to the dark side?
Not too surprisingly I guess, California leads the yes votes, with seven, followed by Colorado with three and seven other states with one each. But the more interesting statistic is that only 17 out of 42 "yes" votes (about 40%) were from the US, and only 4 out of 25 "no" votes (16%) are from the US, and 4 out of 11 "don't know" votes (36%). So if you look at US votes only, the score is 17-4-4, or 68% yes, 16% no, 16% don't know. Outside the US the score is 25-21-7, or 47% yes, 40% no, 13% don't know. So albeit on a small sample size, there is quite a difference between the US and non-US scores, but we don't know anything about the non-US distribution at this point.

I look forward to the next release Sean, will keep gathering data until then!

1 comment:

iCerk said...

No offense to ESRI (they are a fine company)... Peter, I believe you need to "Go Your Own Way" via a new startup, research, etc., primarily because the 'industry' needs more creativity, risk-taking, competition and insight into how this technology can go "Hollywood" as well as how it can (should) collaborate with other technologies to create value and momentum. Geospatial is destined to become a household word just as iPod, Xerox, PC, email and MP3 have become. Just don't forget what you learned to get you where you are today...

"Imagine what Einstein would have done with GIS..."