I decided this fall to move my school’s library website to a blog, and decided to embed different user polls once a week; initially just for fun and to make the page more interactive.

But lo and behold, I’ve discovered that the polls are a great way to see what student preferences are.   And though instinctively I can guess what students are doing, it’s helpful to have that confirmation of my instincts.

A sampling of recent polls shows that students overwhelmingly prefer Google for searching–I thought more of them were using Yahoo, but it gets left in the dust.  And who would have guessed more of them used Digg than AOL–I wasn’t even sure they knew about Digg. (see below for chart).

And a second poll showed that students clearly prefer Facebook and Youtube far above other applications.  Not a big surprise there, but again, these statistics can prove useful when trying to address filtering issues in the district as well.

See the samples of a couple of our polls below.  We use polldaddy, which also allows you do to a brief survey and embed it on your website or blog.