The web is a funny old place. In the years since 1992 we have seen first the rise of personal home pages, then of discussion boards and now weblogs or blogs. But one thing that has remained the same in web space is the near total lack of accountablity and standards for web sites.
There are some excellent web sites out there, you also get some really bad sites, and telling the good from the bad is not an easy job – especially when information is well presented. The worst examples of this can be seen in online polls, which all too often are stuffed by the biases of the content providers, rather than driven by the views of readers.
Do you know that a site manager is being honest with this poll? Often they are not (as in the poll on the Assembly Online site, which was initially stuffed and then never received another vote again)
And if you do trust a site owner, do you know that readers of the site are not circumventing limited security measures to vote multiple times? Almost certainly they are.
So when you see an online poll, take it with a very large bag of salt – they tell you as much about an issue as tossing a coin. Search the web on the Welsh Assembly Poll and you will probably find the same poll with every combination of results, and you will be none the wiser on the issue.
