You’ll notice that the front door of BuzzShout now has a poll. That poll was made on Vizu, and we have also signed on to be their content partner. We’ll be updating our polls once, sometimes twice, a week. We would love your feedback and ideas for polls — email us at info@buzzshout.com.

Neither James nor myself knew much about Vizu before meeting co-founder Dan Beltramo. We were already thinking of adding polls to BuzzShout, but it was going to be something that we would try to implement independently. However, since we love trying out new web apps, we decided to give Vizu a whirl. We were very impressed.

Vizu walks you through each stage of creating a poll, while giving you total control of the look and feel. You first create the question, then choose if it’s an “opinion” poll or a “prediciton” poll. Then choose keywords and categories so that your poll is easy to find on the Vizu site and archives. You are able to add relevant pictures or links to your poll. A Vizu poll on your site is free with registration.

One of the nicest features for exporting a poll to your blog or webpage is that the voting process can be done inline using AJAX. Visitors won’t need to reload a different page to vote, and will instead see the results of the poll right on the site. As a web developer that likes to keep users surfing on my site, this is a must-have feature.

By allowing anyone to create polls, Vizu has also plunged into the poll aggregation space. Since they have the entire database of polls at their disposal, they can feature interesting and popular polls like “How do you feel about GM’s decision to end production of the H1 Hummer?”. As their database and user base grows, marketers will find it useful to see what the public feels about their company, products, and services. Indeed, Vizu should monetize on this in the future by forging the Surveys 2.0 space.

Vizu’s ease of use will draw in a wide range of users, from bloggers to marketers to MySpace users. It will be interesting to see if they can make ripples in the age old industry of surveying.

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