C minus 12 - polls and stuff

A couple of interesting results from on-line polls on right leaning web sites. The first, on Michelle Malkin's site, has Thompson leading with 37% of the vote, more even than Ron Paul (who normally manages to dominate such on-line polls). The second poll, still active, on Captain's Quarters, also has Thompson leading, although to be fair this one is about which candidate you would like to have an egg nog with, rather than which you would vote for!
So, what do these on-line polls mean? Traditionally, the answer has been not very much, and indeed that may well be the case today, but...
Maybe on-line polls are not much less accurate than traditional phone polls. The phone polls today face a number of challenges (e.g. people not having land lines, multiple candidates and small sample sizes, etc.) and we know that the folks who take the on-line polls are likely reading about issues relating to the race on the blogs where they vote. Of course, the on-line polls can be deliberately skewed if a single candidate's campaign gets a bunch of people to go to the blog and do Chicago style voting (early and often) and there is some evidence that the Paul campaign has done this in the past. However, I think in this case the on-line polling may be hooking into a strong phenomenon of growing support for Thompson. I think he will get a very pleasant surprise come early January!