Users of Apple’s iPhone in Japan — or resourceful users elsewhere — have access to “Emoji,” a specific set of emoticons or symbols to add some extra color and personality to their messages.
One page of icons features several forms of transportation. And the rocket symbol in the set looks eerily familiar!
Thanks to Joe Philipson for noticing the strong resemblance. Personally, I still like the plush treatment best!
There’s a reason we’ve seen an explosion of activity from the Kingdom of Belgium: Ask500People has been incorporated into a nationwide school project to explore and use internet tools.
Hundreds of teachers and over 7,000 teens are participating in 270 teams in the Digital Masters competition, which is sponsored by Agoria ICT, Belgium’s largest employers’ organisation and trade association.
In fact, the very first task was to poll the world on Ask500People, focusing on problems and solutions related to one’s ecological footprint. So if you’ve noticed a surge in questions related to the environment (mixed in among all the political polls!), this is why! And organizers were able to tap into our API to keep track of each team’s questions and votes.
“The objective here is to get the schools to use great platforms as Ask500People — I love the fact that they can actually see and read reactions from all over the world,” wrote Steven Pauwels, the architect of the project. He added that Ask500People was the first site he suggested.
The polls were just the beginning, however, and the contest continues for six weeks with two more challenges, taking advantage of other services and platforms. (The first activation? “How nerdy are you?“) Ultimately, the hope is that students become more aware of the tools available to them on the web, and the value of information technology.
“We encourage the teams to use the vast possibilities of the internet, and so far, we have banners around the internet, websites, movies, songs, flyers, leaflets, fanclubs, forums and much much more, all created by these teenagers,” he said. “It is a great thing to see that school principles and teachers are very eager to participate and help out with a sequel!”
On the PBS series scienceNOW (out of WGBH in Boston), a recent episode featured a segment on “Wisdom of the Crowds.” As you might guess, it’s a topic near and dear to our hearts. So we were especially tickled to find Ask500People linked as a resource on the scienceNOW website… sandwiched between the James Surowiecki book that inspired us and the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT.
Curious about what scienceNOW had to say about “Wisdom of the Crowds”? You can watch the segment online.
We’re quite fond of our Ask500People rocket logo, which helps us launch every new question… but we never expected that we’d ever be able to hold and cuddle with it. Now, thanks to the talented Carlos Urreta, we can!
Carlos presented Ask500People founder Aaron with this delightful, hand-made plush rocket at a recent geek meetup in Honolulu.
Too cool. Thanks, Carlos!
Aloha! Time for an update on what’s new around here!
First of all we’d like to welcome Ryan Ozawa to the Ask500People team. He’ll be updating the blog, replying to your questions or suggestions, and working to improve the user experience at the site. More about Ryan.
SITE IMPROVEMENTS
Questions are getting more votes. When we launched each question received 100 responses. As our community has grown and we’ve made it easier to vote the number of responses has risen, and we’re closing in on 500 votes.
We now send traffic to your site. On your profile page you can add your url and site name. We’ll link to you prominently above all of your questions, including the home page.
Faster load times. We’ve implemented several major fixes, especially for users of Internet Explorer 6 to speed up the site. If Ask500People.com felt slow before please give it another try.
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR BEST CONTENT
1. We now have an RSS feed for question results.
2. Email: We’ll send out a weekly email with our best and most active questions, notable comments, what we’re working on and other community news. Look for an email from us this week with a link to subscribe.
3. Twitter: Follow @ask500 to see the best questions on the site as they go live, and click right through to vote! When we reach 5,000 Twitter followers, we’ll randomly select someone to win a Nintendo Wii. Then we’ll choose 10 other followers to receive an Ask500People T-shirt!
FREE STICKERS
We’ve printed Ask500People stickers featuring our trusty rocket. Want a sticker for your laptop? Your bumper? Your forehead? Send an email to 
with your username. You need to have created at least one question to get some stickers!
PROGRAMMING API
Developers can now use our polls within their sites and applications via the programming API. The possibilities are endless, and we’re very interested in hearing how people might be able to tap the Ask500People engine. If you have any questions, please get in touch. More info.
That’s it. Your feedback is welcome and hope to see you around the site!
We’re thrilled to announce that Ryan Ozawa is joining the Ask500People team. He’ll keep you updated with all the new features we’re rolling out and getting your input into what you’d like to see next.
About Ryan: Ryan grew up in Hawaii where he picked up a B.A. in journalism before jumping into the local tech scene. Along with experiments in lifecasting he produces and co-hosts the hugely successful LOST podcast “The Transmission” with his lovely wife Jen, with whom he has also produced (and continues to co-host) three wonderful children.
Please join us in welcoming him!
We’re big fans of Twitter over here, and have integrated it into Ask500People (What is Twitter?). Now you can get live poll alerts in your Twitter feed (follow @ask500) and you can @ask500 people a question right from Twitter.
To connect your Ask500People + Twitter accounts:
1. Follow @ask500 on Twitter
2. Login to your Ask500People account and click on “Profile”. There’s a field there for your Twitter username.
To run a poll directly from Twitter:
1. First make sure you’re following @ask500
2. Ask away! eg. @ask500 Do you have broadband Internet at home?
PS: If you’re on Twitter too, say hello. We’d love to meet you.
Aaron: @dragushan
Ned: @holetse
Roben: @1percenter
Judd: @juddv
Ryan: @hawaii
We printed up some Ask500People stickers for our trip to SXSW Interactive, a conference for web geeks held in Austin TX. We needed a lot of them, with many colours and die-cut, and we needed them in a hurry. Stickergiant.com came through for us, we heartily recommend them if you want some custom stickers (we worked with Maureen). Another big thanks goes out to Katie King at SXSW for helping us out. Thanks guys!
When we arrived, 7,500 attendees had already received them in their conference goody bags, and it was the biggest thrill to see them on people’s laptops at the conference.
This is Eric Marcoullier, co-founder of MyBlogLog and all around neat guy.
Want some Ask500People goodness in the mail? Send an email to ask500stickers@gmail.com with yourAsk500People username (you must have created at least 3 questions!) and your address.
Among the features we’ve been adding lately are improvements to the commenting system.
There are now country flags next to comments so you can see where people are from, (helpful when people say “we” when referrring to their fellow citizens) and now you can edit or delete your own comments. Today we’re rolling out a way users can help us by flagging comments as “inappropriate” if they violate our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service.
Stats fun: Today at one point people were adding comments as fast as every 20 seconds or so across the site, which was neat to watch.
We just passed 13,000 comments. Thanks everyone.
Some folks are using the questions themselves to communicate with the rest Ask500People community. It’s not really what the questions are for but it comes from a desire to communicate and be heard, and we can respect that.
Going forwards, to post a question that’s just for the community and not the world at large, put “Community: ” at the begining and we’ll adjust things on our end so it’s only displayed here. Initially we’ll run these questions for 25 votes, and adjust upwards as long as they still complete quickly.
You can help the site by voting up the best questions, and clicking “mark as inappropriate” for questions that are spam, offensive or have been asked already 5 times this week.
As with everything this is a constant process of refinement, and we’re still tweaking things to get it right. Thanks.