That success is due in no small part to PollDaddy’s acquisition by WordPress’s parent company Automattic last fall. Bloggers could embed PollDaddy into the WordPress blogs (as well as other popular blogging platforms) long before the acquisition, but now PollDaddy is also being included as a feature on WordPress.com, Automattic’s premium hosted blogging platform — and home to over 8 million blogs — that appeals to users who don’t want to deal with having to set up their own blog install. In other words, PollDaddy is now accessible to a much broader audience.

The acquisition opened doors for PollDaddy, helping the site form relationships with large media portals like Fox, NBA.com, and Playboy (the TechCrunch network also uses them frequently). PollDaddy says that its traffic sources are pretty evenly distributed across its portal at PollDaddy.com, its API, and WordPress.com, each of which account for around 33% of new content.

Alongside today’s traffic news, PollDaddy is rolling out a new rating widget (seen above) that lets visitors rate blog rate images, comments, videos, and posts themselves. The feature will be available both on PollDaddy’s homepage and on WordPress.com. This is interesting not only because of PollDaddy’s wide reach, but because of what the company plans to do with it down the line: PollDaddy intends to tie aggregated ratings data into its site PollDaddy Answers, which will surface the hottest images, blog posts, and other content on the web. This could prove quite powerful, potentially turning the site into an alternative to Digg.

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Here’s how they pitch the service:

Pollsb is your ticket for a self-discovery ride. Our ride will allow you to learn new things about yourself, and about the way others perceive you. It’ll help you get instant feedback, and ultimately assist you in developing what we call social identity. It’ll even introduce you to some pretty cool people and help you find some pretty cool stuff people like you seem to enjoy.

The Pollsb ride is fueled by questions, on every topic in the world. Joining you on it are all the other active participants on Pollsb. The insights we provide you stem from where you stand in relation to them.

If that sounds a little vague, it’s because it is.

But I signed up for the service and discovered it is in fact a – gasp – polling application platform (slash social network), and quite frankly not the best one I’ve ever come across. Pollsb lets you create polls and mini-surveys based on text, photo, video and/or audio, assign a category to it, tag it and turn it into a widget (see example below). The poll can be shared with the Pollsb community and by e-mail, but the process also involves the creation of embed code with direct integration to WordPress, Blogger and TypePad blogs.

The user experience is really below par in my opinion, and the widgets are fairly limited (only 5 answers per poll, for example). Pollsb also seems a little thin on the business model front; I doubt placing default Google AdSense advertising units will prove to be enough to give their new investors a return any time soon. They also invite advertisers to buy into their “innovative, tailor-made solutions to engage their precise target audience, tapping into their needs, preferences and opinions” but it’s not clear how they go about this.

As I was writing this, I got an e-mail from someone at Pollsb who saw the poll I created for testing purposes telling me that the polling part of the service is only the “fuel that facilitates what they’re trying to do”, which is help users and companies learn new things about themselves, get quick self-feedback, and brainstorm with others. Fair enough, but good luck telling the rest of the world that you’re not a polling application.

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One of the simplest ways to use Twitter is to conduct instant polls among your followers. But compiling all the replies is an ad-hoc and messy process. Enter twtpoll, a simple polling app that lets you ask multiple choice questions and provides a shortened URL that you can Tweet. All you do is enter your Twitter user name (no password), create the poll, and then hit the “Twitter” option and it creates a Tweet populated with the question and the link to the poll. (You can also ask via Facebook if you are signed in).

I created a poll asking what kind of startups do we need in 2009, with the following choices:

• Social search
• Electric-car batteries
• Webtop Apps
• Cheap Netbooks
• Online Reputation Keeper

The question became this Tweet, which links to a page where you can answer the poll. PollDaddy offers Twitter Polls that are similar.

I kind of wish you could see all the choices and answer via Twitter somehow instead of being taken off to a separate site, but there is only so much you can do in 140 characters.

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Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has acquired Irish startup Polldaddy for an undisclosed sum. The purchase gives WordPress an infusion of polling technology and seems to be justified simply on the basis that bloggers love polls (we use PollDaddy here at TechCrunch for many of our posts).

There appears to be a plugin rollup strategy of sorts underway at the highly decentralized blogging startup, one that will result in the absorption of features into the WordPress codebase that are currently provided through extensions. Automattic recently purchased Intense Debate, a small TechStars startup working on an advanced commenting platform. Further back, it also acquired Buddy Press, a project for layering social networking features onto WordPress, in March and Gravatar, a universal avatar system, last Fall.

Like Intense Debate, Polldaddy doesn’t offer its technology to WordPress publishers alone – and it doesn’t plan to phase out its support for other platforms post-acquisition. But we can expect both companies’ efforts to be driven primarily towards improving WordPress – both the open source version offered at WordPress.org, but even more importantly the hosted version at WordPress.com (with which Automattic can actually make money). PollDaddy has already been baked into WordPress.com for its 4.4 million bloggers.

Given the economic concerns that many startups (domestic and global) have in these volatile times, I’m sure that both PollDaddy and Intense Debate are happy to have found a home within a larger and better funded startup. The fact that PollDaddy is based in Ireland shouldn’t have much impact on Automattic’s corporate structure. As CEO Toni Schneider explained at a recent Startup2Startup event, Automattic has no central office and all its employees work remotely from home, only to meet up a couple times per year as a company.

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Polls are popular on the Web because they are interactive without requiring too much effort. They are also a good way to collect a lot of data from users across the Web. SodaHead, a startup founded by former MySpace executives Jason Feffer and Michael Glazer, announced an $8.4 million series B investment today. The round was led by Mission Ventures and Mohr Davidow. (The company previously raised $4.25 million from Mohr Davidow, Ron Conway, and Tech Coast Angels in January, 2007).

Since the site launched last September, it has attracted 600,000 registered members who have submitted three million answers. SodaHead competes with PollDaddy, SurveyMonkey, and Vizu, although it is targeted more at the MySpace crowd. And you can add songs, videos,and images to the polls. Think Yahoo Answers meets PollDaddy. The company says it is really going after Yahoo Answers. Says Glazer;

We are a community site, around any topic people are taking about. With Yahoo Answers, what they missed is the community aspect.

Although any question a user makes can be spread virally as a widget, 90 percent of SodaHead’s traffic still goes through its site. Traffic has been ramping up nicely to 1.2 million U.S. visitors a month, according to comScore (Yahoo Answers, which seems to be doing fine just the way it is, has 33.6 million and growing).

The site is only running Google AdSense ads right now, but since SodaHead is building up a database of the preferences of members based on what kinds of questions they answer in different categories, and even their specific answers, Glazer is confident SodaHead will be able to do better ad targeting overtime. Another revenue source is helping brands engage with consumers through their own polls.

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PollDaddy, a company until now focused on distributing poll and survey widgets, is taking a stab at turning its website into a more formidable destination.

How? Well, by doing what any company that has distributed its services across the web would do: by pulling them and their associated data back home. The company has decided to set up a central directory of the polls that its users have deployed elsewhere. These 300,000 polls will be searchable and browsable from a sub-site called PollDaddy Answers starting today.

As is evident from the name, PollDaddy wants to leverage its widgets into creating a Yahoo Answers of sorts but one focused on polls. Users will be able to leave comments to these polls as well.

How will widget publishers react? I can imagine at least some of them finding it disconcerting that they’ve lost control over where their polls have been published (and for what audiences). Only premium PollDaddy users will have the ability to opt out of the directory. But on the flip side, a central directory will appeal to people who want to run polls but who don’t have their own websites. With PollDaddy Answers, they can now set up profile pages and list all of their polls there.

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The hype around widgetizing the web may have died down a bit, but PollDaddy – a company obviously focused on polls – will be pushing that widgetizing process further along with its version 2.0 release today.

PollDaddy 2.0 will mark the company’s foray into providing a fuller suite of data-collecting widgets. Starting today, PollDaddy will distribute a new online survey tool and, within a month, the company will provide a more generic form generator that will be capable of making things like contact forms. Around the same time, PollDaddy will release a quiz generator as well. All of these new embeddable tools will build upon the success of the company’s ubiquitous poll widget, which has attracted 70,000 users and is viewed across the web 70 million times per month. The most active poll ever deployed was for R.Kelly’s MySpace page; it garnered 1.2 million responses.

As part of this second version, PollDaddy will also provide better reporting, tracking, fraud detection, and voter location features. While the current services will remain free, some of these new features will cost a premium of $20/month. PollDaddy is also revamping its code base, moving over to Amazon S3 to handle increased traffic, and looking to provide Open Social integration by mid-December.

Aside from adding new functionality, co-founder David Lenehan says that PollDaddy will increasingly focus on building widgets that integrate seamlessly into websites and don’t actually look like widgets. This integration, he says, will signify “a real coming of age for widgets.”

PollDaddy is a two-man, self-funded operation based in Ireland that has been providing widgets for about a year now. The company looks to close its first round of financing in the next six months.

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