It turns out a new expert in Wi-Fi technology also spends his time running Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont. Fred Gilbert, the university's president, has banned Wi-Fi on campus because he believes it potentially has "some fairly significant" health consequences based on some literature he's read. So Fred, what makes you think this research is so conclusive? You got any concrete evidence it's true? And what makes you such an expert when Wi-Fi networks are being established everywhere from hotels to hospitals? Just out of curiosity, Fred, what's your take on reports that cell phones cause brain cancer? It is somewhat ironic that at a time when "Wi-Fi Fred" bans wireless networks, Via Rail is launching Wi-Fi on it trains.

Silicon Beat has a post today on Vizu raising $1-million to develop an online polling service from a group of investors that includes WR Hambrecht + Co, Amicus Capital, Ron Conway, Esther Dyson, Don Hutchison, and Mike Maples, Jr. I've played with several other poll services - Quimble, dPolls - and found them to be interesting tools and fairly easy to use. Vizu was, by far, the most time-consuming poll to create and I was disappointed to discover the only way to distribute it was via e-mail, as opposed to being able to put it on your blog or Web site. The question is whether Vizu, Quimble, dPolls, etc. can become businesses. From what I can tell, dPolls and Quimble are generating revenue from AdSense, which means they have to attract lots of traffic from polls on blogs and Web sites back to their corporate site. It's still pretty early days but I don't see a vibrant business model here unless what we're looking at is low-cost operations that don't require much revenue to survive. My sense is online polling is just another cool Web 2.0 service with limited business prospects. Give me some time, and I'll come up with a catchy acronym or pithy phrase to describe these "cool but..." group.

It's not often that I beat Michael Arrington to the punch but he's just discovered Blogbeat, an effective, but simple-to-install, service to track blog traffic. I've been using Blogbeat for a couple months and experienced some of the ups and down of a new service trying to get its act together before coming out of beta. What was particularly interesting was a recent tweak that was a classic one step forward, two steps back move. Fortunately, it was quickly fixed and the service works well and has a nice look and feel. The real test for Blogbeat will be if people are willing to pay $6 a month for the service at a time when Google Analytics - and presumably MeasureMap now that it's part of the Google empire - is free. Give Blogbeat credit for having a real business model predicated on selling a service - an unfortunate rarity within the Web 2.0 entrepreneurial landscape. In you are thinking about coughing up $6 a month for Blogbeat, a nice option is you can use PayPal.