Closed systems and polls

With so many people able to access a page, and stumble upon it with little less than a search which tangentially connects to that page, the possibility or likelihood of receiving a huge amount of unfiltered nonsense, from many alienated people around the world is very high.

This is the “democracy of the web” at work, and it is not democratic and neither is it useful. It is not democratic as a democratic process involves some level of responsibility and accountablitiy. With the comparative anonymity and the huge numbers of people who can be involved this is difficult if not impossible

This suggests that closed systems are attractive to those who would like to participate in discussion and debate without having to run through a lot of nonsense to do so. A small filter, by way of free registration - which gives access to an number of spaces segregated from the web in general makes sense. (Filtering also comes in the shape of minority interest sites, and moderation.)

Polls on site might be quite useful. The process of gathering the opinions of the passing traffic, which while not scientifically accurate might generate an interesting statistical flow itself. The user expreince is good - seeign my jprefernce in relation to my peers; and providing attractive visual stuff on the page. And it might be useful in terms of some (probably) interesting data snapshots of users interests and preferences.

Polss types: (to be added to) film reviews, positions on debates, factual info about self (do you smack your child, do you have a flat screen telly etc)

None of this is new . . it all happens now . .just some small attempts to get my head around how these actualites work, can be used . .other than just to increase "stickiness"