Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

NBC, one of America's big television networks, has embraced e-learning and opened up the iCue platform. After free registration you get to access tons of video's based on the NBC news archive, games and forums. The heart of the iCue system is the iCue card. This 3D card hard a video with transcript on the front, and some short information on the back, as well as extra links or tags. And as any 2.0 site it has its social component based around profiles (friends).

Like the content or not, but the fact that learning have to move more into visual components such as video fragments is a no-brainer to me. And media companies have a hugh headstart in that. So I expect more media firms to go after some of the learning market out there.

http://www.icue.com/portal/site/iCue/tour

Labels: iCue, learning2.0, NBC, television

Google has released Lively.com upon the world. It is a web-based 3D chat environment. As always with Google services: it is simple. It has not the feature set or worlds of Second Life, just a collection of rooms and a limited variety in avatars and clothing. I guess the rest will come or be available for purchase. Every room has some music playing, which is nice.

That's me on the pic as my lively avatar. You need to have a Google account (such as for your gmail), and you need to install a software. After that, you can login and visit all rooms via Internet Explorer or Firefox. I don't know what this is realy, I guess a virtual chat room, nothing more.
And what did you guess? After a few weeks of availability, the platforms is used most for... right, things that are not conform the rules of the site. The number one room on the 'all rooms' page is called 'Sex Club'. Rest my case. People will be people I guess, virtual or not.

Labels: 3D internet, lively

It has nothing to do with quizzes or web 2.0, but it's holiday for everyone :-). I purchased and downloaded a preview chapter of the game 'World of Goo', and I'm enjoying it very much. I love those sticky balls :-).


Here's more about the game and a little movie:
http://www.2dboy.com/games.php

Labels: goo

I'm a fan of visually structuring your thoughts, notes or even e-learning menus via mindmaps, and I've blogged on them before.

Lately, new complete web-based mind mapping tools have changed the landscape a bit. You can read on tools like mindmeister, meadmap or spinscape on the WebWare blog.

My new favorite mindmapping tool however is mindomo.com. It has a nice flash-based interface and an Office-like menu, and you can share your maps with anyone you wish to. The resulting maps are visually appealing and allow for notes and links. In the free version the number of private maps you have is limited, so they offer a paying service too. But you probably want to try it for yourself. And right you are in doing so.

PS Update: another site for making simple mindmaps is Text2MindMap.com . It does pretty much what the title suggests.

Labels: mindmaps, mindomo.com

MyStudiyo.com is another site that allows you to easily create a quiz and then add it to your site. Some of these quizzes seem sponsored, like the one in the image about babies that gives you a Pampers offer at the end.
The site has the usual question types, but allows for images to support the questions, and has a variable number of points per question. After you submit the answer you get some feedback and the percentage of people who knew.
Sharing is possible via an embedded iframe, and you can post, bookmark or e-mail. Another nice feature is that you can created quizzes that allow users to add questions (and you can moderate that optionally).

Labels: mystudiyo, quiz, trivia

Linkedhot.com is a beta site where you in one go can see how many popular search engines or web 2.0 tools keep an eye on your site.

Announcing : the first trivia tournament on about2findout.com!

In July, the first Big Trivia Tournament will go live. This is what you can expect:
- There will be 25 brand new quizzes posted during the entire month. That is almost one per day.
- Only logged in users can participate (if needed you can create a free account)
- You have the entire month to solve the quizzes, so you can do it when best fits you. Do one every day, do them all at the end, or before or after you take a holiday.
- Your tournament score is the sum of all points on all the questions in the tournament. You will still get your regular points too and those include the double points for getting 7 or more on a quiz. For the tournament, it's just the sum of your points on the questions you had right.

So, just a little more patience, and the game begins...

Labels: about2findout, game, quiz, tournament, trivia

SmallWorlds is a virtual world currently in beta. It runs entirely in your browser, so you don't need to install a client program. (It's based on Adobe Flex technology I believe, so you just need Flash.)

It is not made of worlds or islands, but is a collection of rooms. When you sign up for free, you get your own room that you can decorate. On the image you see me and my cat pet shopping for some furniture.

What is cool is how they integrate for exampe YouTube video's: you can have a TV player set, and watch with other avatars to YouTube video. The place is also packed with all kind of games to play, and I think they are working on an API set to include your own games in there. Now, would it not be cool to play trivia quizzes in this virtual world with questions that come from this site? :-) Just dreaming out loud.
Anyway, looked promising...

Labels: Second Life, smallworlds, virtual worlds

I've been very lazy posting to my blog lately. My apologies.

This is one of the cool sites I encountered in the past time and wanted to share with you for no other good reason than to share a site: akinator.com . It's a Gini with some articial intelligence behind (at least I think, I hope they don't pay a bunch of Vietnamese or Indian people to type it in :-) ) that will ask you a series of questions on the person you are thinking off. I thought of my cat. It worked!

(Thanks to Ralph for sending the link.)

Labels: sites

Google has a translation page, where you can translate sentences and web pages between many languages. It is automatic translation that is about 70% accurate I would say, and will in the other cases return wrong or funny results. Machine translation is still not at a point where it can reliably translate texts, but it can provide enough to get the gist of the text, and it helps translators out because the base translation is done, you just need to correct.

So I have experimented with the Google AJAX Language API today. You can find more information and a sample on the following links:

http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/reference.html#LangContentType
http://www.google.com/uds/samples/language/translate.html

I was able based on this documentation to create a page where the original text of a question in in the left column, and the automatic translation in the right. An administrator can then verify and correct the new language, and save that question as a draft. As I'm using the Ajax calls, all is implemented in pure javascript on the browser itself, so I don't need any server-side calls or an API license, as it is the client that will request the translation to Google.

An what about the first results? Well, it is not perfect, but it does save a lot of time translating as especially the answer options are usually correct (they are short). The longer the question, the more trouble the automatic translation has to make a correct grammatical sentence out of it.
But first results are promising. I still need to work on it further, but I don't plan to make this a general tool on the site as I fear it will generate a lot of poorly translated questions. I prefer to keep it as a productivity tool to help real flesh and blood administrators to speed up the translation work.

Labels: asp.net, google, google language, machine translation

Another landmark for the site: the 100th quiz just went online, it's one about financials. Enjoy.

Just had some fun at another 2.0 like site, this time to add text balloons to your photo's and share them. Below are my cat and myself. The site works very well and you can try it for yourself at : http://www.superlame.com.

Just came across a free site where you can generate an image of a 3D box. It is called 3d-pack.com and very easy to use: just upload the picture for the front, top and side, and you're done.

Labels: 3D internet, 3d-pack.com

I must admit, I'm too old to 'get' the ever so popular Facebook. I do have an account, and some people have thrown me a sheep and such, but I still just don't get the concept. Anyway, this youtube movie shows the 'real life' equivalent to how Facebook works. Hilarious.

Labels: facebook

Question number 1000 is part of a quiz on the Eurovision Song Contest. Enjoy and keep the questions coming!

The home page of about2findout.com is renewed. First of all, there is a new slogan for the site. Instead of 'quiz 2.0 has arrived', it is now 'what do you know?'. The main page still has the same general navigation at the top, but the search link is now on the right top accessible anywhere. The center of the new home page has two colored pieces: one for the quiz zone and one for the author zone, with many direct useful links. Every 30 seconds, a new random question and associated author are shown.

Another new feature is the page 'All questions', that as the name suggests shows a list of all published questions in the database. You can order the list by clicking on the column headings, and you can filter it by language and filter out questions you have already done.

Last but not least, there is a 'Tell a Friend' page that allows you to send an e-mail message to invite a friend to check out the site.

The Hall of Fame page shows the 50 highest scores by default, or the 50 highest accuracies, 50 most recent, most difficult, most popular or best rated questions. And when you have answered a question, the left bar shows a link to the quiz the question is part of, if any.

Labels: about2findout.com

I'm trying to implement some caching features on the site, in order to speed it up or to allow more users to access it simultaneously. There is a good video tutorial on asp.net caching on the asp.net site. On the next major update of the site, I'm using the outputcache control on a few pages, and I hope it will not interfere with the many ajax calls and personalized data on use on the pages.

Update: I tried it and it failed. I'll have to use other caching techniques to cache parts of a highly personalized and multilingual site like about2findout.com

Labels: ajax, caching

Similar to the about2findout.mobi site, I changed the main web site to also give you the choice of 3 different random questions when you are not following a quiz.

Check it out here.

Labels: about2findout

Today about2findout.com reached 900 questions. Up to the 1000 milestone!

Labels: about2findout.com, news

This month, the site had 2731 visitors that did on average 7 pages per visit and came from 83 countries. The top visiting countries are in order: USA, India, UK, Belgium, Canada.

The most popular quiz was the Capitals quiz. In April 17 quizzes, 46 new people and 139 questions were added to the site, and Dailydog had the top score, and India was the top scoring country. Except for 1 week, there were no special advertisement or other promotion campaigns. The peak on April 26 I guess is because of a lot of StumbleUpon traffic that day.

Labels: about2findout.com, news