I noticed that ani-nouto took issue with the poll I ran earlier in the week, saying this:
When a blogger does this sort of thing, it serves two purposes: to have some material for readers to relate to (and comment upon), and to get some series to watch. A bare poll is a bad way to do either. An article would at least show that the blogger did his homework and thus make it more likely that readers do the work of replying. But even if they reply as-is, the resulting commenting without any knowledge where the individual in question comes from degenerates into a contest of favourites, which is not going to produce any meaningful outcome.
A few points: notwithstanding the fact that I didn’t even think this was a topic worthy of creating a post over, I’m not sure what the problem is. If one is asking a poll to ask something like “what should I watch next,” I’m not sure what “homework” there is to do, and I’m not sure why “denigrating into a contest of favorites” is necessarily a bad thing if the purpose of the poll is to simply get an idea of what to watch next.
I mean, even if I did some sort of “homework” (writing a short synopses of each series, perhaps?), I’m not sure why it wouldn’t turn into a contest of favorites anyway. Now, if I was asking which series was better, and did a writeup of what I thought, then I could see this point being brought up, but that wasn’t what I was doing.
On the second point, the primary purpose of the poll was to “see what type of response back I get from a poll to see if having polls would be worthwhile or not” and I merely did the “what should I watch” question just because I could at least get something out of the poll, even if the response wasn’t all that good. I basically grabbed the first 6 Volume 1s in my Netflix queue and put them in the poll – meaning those were shows I was getting prepared to watch soon anyway and I was merely asking which I should watch first.
Now, if I’ve watched everything under the sun and I’m grasping for new things to watch, and I can’t come up with anything, then I might do some expansive post like the one that ani-nouto provided as an ideal example. Of course, then I wouldn’t do it as a poll either.
In any case, I’ve already written more on this than I intended to.
One Comment
Meh…maybe websites are different, but people frequently do that regarding what new content to add. Why should blogs be held to different standards? IMHO.