About TallyUp (Beta)
Last edited: Feb 5 2010
In the age of 24 hour cable news networks, real time status updates, and endless user generated content, reviews, and comments on the web, it has become virtually impossible to accurately understand how others think, feel, and act. There is so much qualitative content on and off the web that we can barely read, watch, or listen to a fraction of it. Often very little is known about the people behind the messages we hear on and offline. And increasingly, it seems that the loudest voice gets the most attention and distorts our perceptions of reality.
TallyUp aims to provide much greater knowledge and understanding about humanity by quantifying and organizing information about people and their opinions, and by making this data as transparent and freely accessible to as many people as possible.
The project is motivated by a strong belief in democracy, free speech, and transparency. It stems from the viewpoint that communication on the web (particularly opinion-sharing) needs to be made more efficient, both for those speaking and those listening.
Ok, that’s great…but what the heck is it?
TallyUp is a tool for people who want to collect, express, or mine data about people and their opinions in the fastest and most efficient way. At its heart, TallyUp is an open, transparent, next-generation polling and opinion platform. It enables anyone to create, find, mine, or respond to polls and surveys about millions of subjects, for free.
Care to find out what your friends think of a new movie, how a certain country feels about a global news issue, or what people thought of a certain city at one point in time versus now? TallyUp aims to let you answer these and other questions over time and to create a repository of truly useful information for everyone.
Distributed Polling
One of the principal differentiating factors about TallyUp, is that it offers fully distributed polling on the web. Much in the same way web videos are shared online, TallyUp polls can be embedded across the web and a single poll can be hosted (or “syndicated”) at thousands of different websites simultaneously.
This is no small thing. Traditionally, polls on the internet sit at one site, meaning fewer responses may be collected, and responses may be biased due to the nature of a website’s audience. Just consider how a political poll might collect vastly different results depending on whether it’s hosted on a left versus a right-leaning political website.
By allowing a single poll to sit on multiple sites, TallyUp polls may contain more reliable, higher integrity results, since that bias can be reduced or eliminated, and since more responses can be collected from sites across the web. Moreover, TallyUp lets anyone see or filter poll results, by the websites where they were collected. Care to see only the political opinions of people who responded from a certain blog, or the product opinions of people who answered a poll at your favorite technology site? TU lets anyone do this and much more with its sophisticated filter system.
Filter System
With TallyUp’s advanced filter system, users may sort through polls in profound and interesting ways. Filters can be layered to enable discovery and learning about the world. Virtually all content on TallyUp can be filtered by the age, gender, and location of others on the site. Care to see how your Facebook friends responded to a certain political poll? TallyUp lets you do this. Care to know what people your age and your gender said about a certain movie? You may do this as well.
Users may even cross reference polls results. At TallyUp, results from one poll can be filtered by results from another. Consider a poll about the best burger in your city. TallyUp lets you filter this information and see only those responses of individuals who indicated that they eat out more than 3 times a week in another unrelated poll.
Whether researching something for consumer, academic, scientific, or other reasons, TallyUp is designed to let anyone explore the uncharted relationships and correlations between our – humanity’s – data. And as more information is collected, the more useful existing TallyUp data becomes.
Internet Discovery
TallyUp also functions as a discovery engine, enabling users to find new websites and blogs that are actively collecting information on subjects of interest. It also offers a great way for websites and blogs to gain exposure and web traffic. Whenever a site embeds a TallyUp poll and collects data, its URL will be profiled alongside the poll at TallyUp.com and users will be able to visit that site for more information, research, to buy a product, or for any other reason.
Structure
Finally, TallyUp is an organizer of polls and opinion information. A giant taxonomy, called the “ Special Subject System ”, allows users to create or find polls and opinions related to specific topics, chosen from a multitude of pre-existing subject pages.
At the moment, the special subject system consists of the entirety of Wikipedia’s English language articles, meaning you may already create, find, share, or answer polls about millions of known subjects. Over time, this system will become even more comprehensive as more subjects are added.
Conclusion
Although TallyUp is just entering its beta launch, it already contains a variety of unique and powerful features that you will hopefully find useful and interesting. It is the sincere hope of the many people who have worked to launch this project, that you will contribute however you can and share your feedback as you do. We promise to strive to make TallyUp into the best site it can possibly be.
