PollDaddy allows you to create polls for your site using a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Polls can be an easy way to create some simple user interaction, but there are many providers out there for the simple polls you see on many websites.

One of the more prominent services is PollDaddy, a product of Wordpress-creator Automattic. PollDaddy has both free and paid accounts. Paid accounts are necessary for anyone who plans to draw a large number of responses.

The service stands out because of its ease of use (it’s interface is almost entirely drag-and-drop) and the amount of customization it allows.

There are many services out there to create polls, but if you’re looking for a simple service to start with PollDaddy is a good choice.

User-generated content on news websites is nothing new, though. It started as a way to obtain event photos and brief user comments to drive traffic to news sites, which still continues today (more on that in a future post). But it has now evolved into something much more powerful, as users have not just been included in the newsgathering process, but the reporting process as well.

New York University adjunct professor Clay Shirky explained this notion of increased collaborative capacity made possible by the Internet during a TED talk in 2005. Previously, he says, an institution had to be created to collaborate. That institution would coordinate the activities of the group. Shirky argues that is no longer necessary in all cases because technology has significantly decreased the cost of collaboration among people.

“Because the cost of letting groups communicate with each other has fallen through the floor – and communication costs are one of the big inputs to coordination – there has been a second answer, which has been to put the cooperation into the infrastructure, to design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a by-product of the operating of the system without regard to institutional models.”

Take the “friending” features on a social network. Many social networks allow you to designate your own social network where your information is visible by marking your “friends” on the network. In doing so, the network is automatically redefined for each person to create a more valuable network for each individual. If Facebook were to attempt to determine who each user’s friends independently, it would take years. However, by opening that process up to users, Facebook has distributed that cost over the entire network and harnessed users’ efforts to create a more valuable network for all users and a more meaningful data structure.

For an example in journalism, check out Help Me Investigate, a site that connects users and allows them to collaborate on an investigative reporting project. Anyone can “launch an investigation”, then invite others to help them and eventually publish a report on their findings. Citizens collaborate and file open records requests and do much of the same work that professional reporters once did by breaking investigations up into many small tasks that users can accomplish at their own pace.

A site such as Help Me Investigate is a rare breed in journalism, though, because the site facilitates journalism that is curated by the site’s users. Much more common is a news organization harnessing user power, then employing the organization’s resources to weave the user efforts into a professionally-produced package. Those organizations often also perform a gatekeeping function. In other instances, though, that role is also turned over to users who vote, rank or comment to steer coverage.

For example, when the Dallas Morning News was hit with more than 1,000 pages of documents about the JFK assassination, they posted them online and asked users to weigh in with what they found. The Guardian of London wrote a computer program to handle a similar situation with a giant set of public documents this summer.

Other sites ask users to invest money rather than time. Spot.Us, a California site, funds reporting by soliciting small donations from users – normally about $20 each. Some of the site’s users say the reporting funded by the site fills gaps lacking in coverage by major news outlets. Take as an example this ($5,000) ongoing examination of the San Fransisco city budget.

The Washington Post is currently experimenting with a moderated Wikipedia-like microsite that allows the site’s users to help write profiles of D.C.’s “power players.” Other organizations are simply turning to social media or the comment features on their websites to draw information from users. And it’s quite common among small community newspapers to include citizen columnists and run photos sent in by readers alongside staff-produced content.

Afterthoughts: Chip Stewart points to an experiment from August involving the Washington Post and the New York Times. Both asked readers for help going through a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report that had information about what went on in “secret prisons”. In the case of the Times, the documents were posted online and readers posted comments on the Times blog. NPR has a story on the project’s initial results.

Posting documents like the Times and Post did in this case is becoming a more common practice among news organizations, so much so that the Knight Foundation is providing funding to the Times and nonprofit investigative site ProPublica to develop a system, called DocumentCloud, to post documents easier, index them more effectively and allow them to be shared among news organizations. Coverage of DocumentCloud here.

Many of these startups are popping up to fill what they see as gaps in coverage by established news organizations. If professional news organizations can’t fund this coverage, then are there really any other options besides citizen journalism? The New York Times has tried training citizen journalists to produce content for its citizen-run sites. But, is providing training a possible new revenue stream for news organizations? One Texas news organization thinks so. Will these citizen-driven sites ever be appealing to advertisers? And does that even matter if they continue to self-fund?

Google Moderator lets your users suggest ideas or questions then vote among them

Google Moderator lets you create polls where users can decide between competing questions, suggestions or ideas.

Except it’s different than a traditional poll in that you, the creator, don’t have to provide the ideas for users to choose among. Instead, the tool harnesses the power of the crowd to create the ideas and to moderate the forum and reach a consensus. The White House used the tool in March to solicit questions for the president to answer during a Town Hall meeting.

Picture the Impossible is an alternate-reality game developed to attract young readers to the newspaper. It’s one of several ventures into “news gaming” that have popped up in the last few years. Those experimenting with the technologies say they can be used to explain complex issues in ways that are more engaging than a traditional news story.

“A hundred years ago, putting news in a newspaper caused people to take action in certain ways,” managing editor Traci Bauer, told Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab. “That doesn’t seem to motivate people under 40. The people who write letters to the editor to newspapers aren’t people under 40, they’re people in their 60s. That’s no longer the way to get people to use information and act accordingly.”

The games can take significant time to develop, though, and require special skill sets not available at many news organizations.

The Rochester game is especially unique in the news game realm because it also incorporates a social element. Users of the game are competing against other people in the community and interacting with them, which takes the game to a different level of complexity from an administrative and development standpoint.

As the Nieman Lab explains, the game’s storyline is derived from the town’s history. Gamers are split into teams that will compete for local charities. There are scavenger hunts, online games and even elements that incorporate the newspaper’s printed product.

Some have also experimented with smaller scale games, without the community element of Picture the Impossible. The Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota developed a gaming project with funding from the Knight Foundation called “Playing the News.”

In Playing the News, users are placed into a virtual city and tasked with interviewing key stakeholders in the debate on ethanol fuel, the results of which appear in a virtual notebook. The professors at Minnesota also built a virtual board game on the issue. Ultimately, the researches who created the games found them to be unappealing to users, likely because they dealt with serious issues, but recommended news games for feature-type news content. The Knight Foundation continues to fund experimentation in this area.

Other examples include Switch, which challenges users to balance energy distribution New York City’s electric grid, and Balance, where users must balance a city’s budget successfully using figures from the actual budget.

Most of these games are produced through grant projects or as one-time experiments. Issues still remain about how the projects can be sustained. In-game advertising is a possibility as is a sponsorship model. The games also provide increased engagement levels, which addresses a long-held belief by many that low engagement is one of the most daunting problems facing news organizations online.

On the advertising side, popular game makers have already experimented with in-game advertising. See these stats here from in-game ad agency Engage, and check out Google’s efforts at selling ads in popular online games.

Games are also being used as advertisements in other cases. Game-maker Hasbro’s interactive division currently has a live example of this. The company launched a massive, worldwide online version of Monopoly to promote its newest version of the board game and was swamped with demand within hours of launching the game. Chevron also has experimented with games, launching Energyville to teach users about clean energy.

Afterthoughts: To see some academic research in progress on games and news, check out this blog by Georgia Tech researchers.

The issue raises several questions. If the technological barriers to entry are decreased, will this become a viable storytelling method someday? How can these games be monetized for news organizations? A great deal of in-game advertising is subtle and doesn’t allow for the typical wall between editorial content and advertising that is a stable of mainstream news. And, will advertisers grow to appreciate the value of hyper-engaged active users enough to make advertising in games a valid monetization method? Finally, what are the possibilities for mobile games, where software sales are rapidly increasing?

You can use Sharendipity's tools to create an interactive online game

So you want to create your own game? Try a free online service such as Sharendipity.

It’s one of several online services out there that will let you create games from scratch or allow you to customize an existing template. A great deal of the services out there offer templates and games that can’t be customized to include information that might be useful to news readers, though. There are also many ways to create online quizzes thanks to the proliferation of social networking sites.

CoverItLive is ideal for anything from live-blogging a sports event to moderating an online panel discussion.

Here’s a tool that’s starting to pop up all over the place lately. CoveritLive is a sort of hybrid between a chat room and a blog. It’s often being called live-blogging.

CoveritLive (and similar services) is often used for sporting events or for fluid breaking news situations. The free service allows you to place a box on your own website that you can use to post short updates about an event, insert photos and videos, and take questions from readers/viewers.

It’s not the free-for-all that many things are online, though, because the person who is in charge of the chat has complete control over whose comments get through.

For more information, check out this write-up I did on the service a few months ago.

If you’re looking for an example of how CoveritLive might be used, check out this example from student newspaper sports editor Travis L. Brown of the TCU Daily Skiff.