Seattle is a hotbed for new media experiments, and Publicola is no different. It’s a politically focused blog run by former editors of The Stranger, has attracted a series of investors, and in just a year is read by everyone in Washington politics.

Last year we sponsored a poll that Publicola did for the Seattle Mayor’s race. It got so much coverage in other local media, and such a large surge in traffic to Publicola, that they decided to start running polls on a regular basis. So last night, at Publicola’s 1 year anniversary party at the Crocodile (with some great bands), we jointly announced plans to feature polls once or twice a month on Publicola’s website. A respected local polling firm, EMC Research, will help design and analyze results, and yours truly will be the engine that powers it all.

We love helping new media find cost effective tools to be able to compete with the big guys. The local TV stations can afford to purchase surveys from SurveyUSA, but until we arrived on the scene, innovative blogs like Publicola had no retort. Now they can participate too, and readers benefit from better reporting all around. We’re just happy to make it easy and affordable for anyone to gather data from the phone.