Hello – allow me to introduce… myself.

Shanti Braford here. (my blog) I’ve been behind the scenes here at Sprout It working on a top-secret Ruby on Rails project that should be our 2nd integrated application in the Sprout It suite of web-based hosted apps for small businesses.

But that’s all going to change soon (not the secret part, at least not yet), as I am getting involved in Mailroom development / bug fixes / enhancements in a much bigger way here shortly.

Scott Barron has been doing an incredible job on Mailroom. He’s been working with and contributing to the core Ruby on Rails framework since the its early days on the scene. Needless to say, I’ve certainly learned a thing or two from Scott and look forward to working with him more in the future.

Ok, back on topic—BlogPolls!

The idea. BTW – if anyone knows Michael Arrington, see if he will plug this idea on TechChrunch because a week later we could have five Web 2.0 startups building BlogPolls ™, one will even have raised 2M in Venture Capital already. And yes, that’s all very much a good thing! =)

BlogPolls ™ would:

• be a web hosted service (nothing to install, of course)
• have a predefined list of common questions to ask your blog audience
• allow you to easily customize your poll form
• email you a summary of the results and responses
• provide nice, pretty color-coded graphs of the collected data (duh)
• be full of ajaxy goodness
• provide an API (we can wait for version 2 on this one)

Thus BlogPolls ™ would allow you to:

• learn who your audience is—what their interests are, etc.
• provide demographic data to advertisers (ex: 80% of readers make $75k or more. w00t!)
• target your site content better and learn what they want to read about on your blog

So, any takers? If you build this, I can guarantee you at least one paying customer if the price is right.

Disclaimer: I have done 0 Google searches to actually see if, you know, maybe this already exists. That’s just how I roll.