New in Gather Labs: Polls for you, your friends, your groups

20081211 UPDATE: We have corrected the bug in the Gather Editor that was causing polls to display incorrectly.  This should now be working well.  You will need to post new code for polls posted previously for them to display correctly.  Thanks for the patience.  - TAG

Welcome back to Gather Labs, where we share some things that aren't quite fully baked that we are playing with behind the scenes.

What's on tap today?  We had so much fun watching all of the political polls last month that we thought it might be a good time to let you create your own.  Our Dev team has enabled polls by the site PollDaddy to be embedded into Gather posts.  To create your own poll:

1) create an account on Poll Daddy (note that they have free accounts or you can spend a little money and brand polls your way)

2) create your own poll there (it's pretty easy to figure out)

3) Poll Daddy will give you five options for posting your code.  Copy the code from the Flash Poll Method at the bottom of the screen.

4) create a new Gather post

4) click the "HTML" link at the top of the article editor.  A new window will open showing the actual HTML (the web code) for your article

5) Paste the Poll Daddy code into that HTML box

6) Click "Update" on the HTML window.  It will vanish and a box will appear in your article which shows where your poll will appear.

Here is a sample I created.  Go on...give it a try:

Note that you can also email your polls to friends not on Gather, so it's a great way to survey organizations that you belong to as well.

Please let me know your thoughts.  But remember, Gather Labs is a place where we play with new technologies.  Things will be clunky and may break.  This isn't for the technophobic.  We do not offer tech support/member support for Gather Labs.  The tech you see here may go away any time or may be included in the product in a different form someday.