How could the strategy here be anything other than "pick 0"?
Even the other degenerate strategy of "pick something which is like negative infinity" is a guaranteed loser, and it's only interesting if you assume everyone else will pick positive numbers (which your web app specifies, though your problem statement doesn't).
Pick a number Whoever's number is closest to one half the average of all submitted numbers wins!
I just whipped together a tiny wsgi app for this:
http://sente.cc/wsgi/number_poll/