As some of you may know there is an Apple press event today regarding an update to some of their music products. Apple events always generate a lot of buzz and Gizmodo, the biggest gadget blog on the planet, is always there reporting for their millions of waiting fans. This time around they thought they would try some live feedback on their blog to include the many readers who are eagerly awaiting news. Together with design firm Mekanism we came up with a unique voting mechanism to find out how Apple fans think about the new products released in real time. Head on over to the Gizmodo live blog to see this in action.
Go vote now!

PollDaddy has many ways for you to distribute your surveys and polls, from widgets and embed codes to simple URLs. We’ve now added another way for you to get your surveys and polls out there with a much-requested Email Groups feature.

Simply put, email groups allow you to maintain groups of email addresses. The magic comes when you create a poll or survey – you now have the ability to directly send it to one or more of your email groups. This makes it an ideal way to notify your users quickly and simply, with PollDaddy taking the strain of sending the emails.

To ensure you have full control over your email groups you can import and export addresses using CSV files. Each group can contain as many email addresses as you want, and the same address can occur in multiple groups – perfect for different email campaigns.

In addition to storing a name (first and last) and email address, you can also add custom data to each address which can then be used when sending out emails. For example, you may want to store a salutation, a product name etc.

Note that while anyone can create and manage email groups, only Pro or Pro2 users can actually send emails. Pro users will receive an allowance of 10,000 emails per month, with Pro2 users receiving 50,000. If you need more then custom allowances can be created by contacting support.

Naturally we want to prevent PollDaddy from becoming a source of spam and so all outgoing emails will be tagged with an opt-out link. Anyone receiving an email can quickly register that they do not want to receive any more.

Full details about managing and using email groups can be found on the email groups support page.

Let the emails flow!

Our polls will now accept and render a limited set of HTML tags in the poll question and answer text fields.

This means you will be able to format the text directly, add an image and/or add a link into the text fields. This feature allows you another method to further customize your poll. This has been a frequently requested feature that we have been a little slow to add due to some security concerns.

We have white-listed a limited set of HTML tags that are safe to use. Check out the support article to see the full list of tags available.

If you have some suggestions on more HTML tags that we could add, leave feedback here and we’ll check them out.

We have partnered with a company called AddToAny.com to add a cool sharing option to your polls. When you create a poll on PollDaddy.com now there is an option to enable sharing. (To see how this works hover over the “Share This” link in the poll below.) This is going to be available as a trial for a few weeks to see if users find it useful.

With AddToAny enabled in your poll, your voters will be able to share a link to the page on your site across WordPress, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, email and much more. This will help spread the word that you have a super cool poll going down and you need more votes! So what do you think? Is it a good addition?

As a new member of the PollDaddy team I’m pleased to announce that we’ve now added restrictions to surveys. This allows you to restrict access to a survey using a password, or to a chosen set of IP addresses. Both of these should make surveys more useful to people who don’t want the entire world and their dog taking part in their survey, and are ideal for group or internal company surveys.

For example, when restricting by password a visitor will see this:

Both options are available while editing a survey, as shown below.

Full details about how to use the new features can be found on the PollDaddy support page.

We are excited to announce today that PollDaddy Jr. is now available to users of Webs.com. This partnership will allow Webs.com users to create and manage their PollDaddy polls directly in their Webs.com site editor without the need to go to PollDaddy.com. If you use Webs.com you can access this new functionality by clicking on the ‘Addons’ button in the site editor. From there just choose polls on the left hand side and you will see our app.

Webs.com provide all the tools you need to create a professional-looking website in minutes. Add a blog, forum, calendar, photo gallery, video gallery and much more. You also have the ability to add members and create personal profiles so you can turn your site into a community where friends, colleagues and family can connect and collaborate. You can sign up for a free Webs.com account here to try it out.

If you would like any more information on PollDaddy Jr. and how it can super charge your own online community then please get in touch!

If you need to put a poll on your site but you are limited for space then you can check out our new micro style. It’s a super small poll and its available on PollDaddy.com, our WordPress Plugin and PollDaddy Jr. today. You can also load it into our new visual poll style editor to customize for yourself.

We have updated the visual style editor on PollDaddy to incorporate some of the features of our new style layouts. The visual style editor lets your create your own custom poll styles without needing to know any CSS. You can find this feature by clicking on the ‘polls’ drop-down menu at the top of your account and choosing ‘Custom Poll Styles’.

We have added the following new features…

Pre-load Existing Styles
When creating a new custom style, you can pre-load some of our existing styles. Aluminum, Plain white, Plain Black, Paper, Skull Light and Skull Dark can be pre-loaded into the editor for you to manipulate and save as your own.

Better Control Over Layout
New styles such as ‘answer group’ and ‘answer check’ give you much more control over positioning of answers, radio buttons and check boxes. Text can now also be aligned left, center or right.

Vote Button
Previously the editor always outputted the same grey vote button. Now you have full control over the appearance of the vote button. They even have a loading effect when you press them. The new buttons are fully compatible with the custom language pack.

Rounded Corners
Under the border control for most elements there is now a  border-radius option to give a rounded corner effect. This effect does not work with Internet Explorer, you can set it for users of Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera etc.

Links
All links in the poll such as ‘view results’, ‘return to poll’ and ‘view comments’ can be styled.

Result Bar
The result bars have a new height property to give more control over their appearance and any background image you might set for them.

All of these new features are also available on PollDaddy Jr. If you have any questions or would like to make a suggestion relating to this please let us know.

We have added a new option to the poll style and language pack editor – Update polls.

This option is available when you are editing a style or a language pack. It will allow you to update all the polls that currently use the style or the language pack that you have edited.

This option just makes it easier to implement changes across all your polls more quickly.

Any other shortcut recommendations/suggestions are welcome here

We have added some cool new features to how our polls are currently built on PollDaddy.com. There are 6 new poll styles and we have  made it a lot easier for designers to create more advanced custom styles.

With this new platform we will now be adding new styles on a more regular basis. All of this new content is available across PollDaddy.com, PollDaddy Jr., and our WordPress Plugin. For more information check out the list below.

• Vote Feedback
  Previously when someone voted on your poll there was a slight delay before the results came back. When someone votes now a loading wheel will replace the button to show that something is happening. This is controlled by the new CSS class “pds-vote-button-load”. This class will be applied to the vote button once it is pressed.
• 6 New Basic Styles
  There are now 6 new poll styles to choose from. There are 2 new basic styles: black and white. Paper, Aluminum and dark and light skull style.
• Adjustable Widths
  All basic polls styles are now available in wide (630px), medium (300px) and narrow (150px) widths so that the polls will fit in better with your blog posts, sidebars and profiles.
• New CSS classes for better layout
  We have added new CSS classes and some new span tags around a lot of the key elements on both the poll and results view. It is much easier now to accurately place answers beside radio buttons and adjust the result bars to different styles. A good example of the new style layouts can be found in the results text for each answer. Now the answer, percentage and number of votes can be divided out into separate elements and styled individually.
  

• Links images hide links etc.
  All links in the polls (view results, return to poll, and comments ) all have individual CSS class names attached meaning that they can be hidden or replaced with images.
• Available on…
  All of these new features are available on PollDaddy.com, PollDaddy Jr., and our WordPress plugin today.

If you need help with any of these new features, please feel free to get in touch.