What’s so interesting about a Web-based opinion poll on the Samuel Alito ( President Bush’s latest supreme court nominee) nomination? Obviously, someone’s done the math on using the Web to perform data collection, likely cheaper than staffing a call center and phoning the world via phone. My thought, though, is that the data is likely to be skewed because of a couple of factors. First, the poll is conceivably only open to those with a computer and an Internet connection (not to mention a spare ‘5-7 minutes’), leaving those across the ‘digital divide’ left in the dark. Second, those that ‘voluntarily’ take a poll by responding to an ad are likely to be more ‘activist’ in nature as opposed to the unassuming soccer mom who answered the phone while cooking dinner. Hence, the results can’t be looked at in a vacuum. Just another example of how the Web is changing things.