Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

Labels: bing, quiz, wolfram

Labels: magritte, quiz

It has been months since I visited my quiz site and I was pleasantly surprised that although there have been no new quizzes, no newsletters, no friday quizday or google advertisements since december last year, the site receives still 2000 hits per month, and new people still enroll and enjoy the quizzes. There were also new questions added by various folks.

Yesterday I updated the site, basically upgrading it and throwing out a lot of stuff. People tell me my site is complicated and has too much. So as of today:

- Upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 Express edition, with .net framework 3.5
- The interface is only English, no more Dutch or multilingual (questions can still be made in multiple languages)
- No more tag assistent, and only 3 instead of 5 tabs for making questions
- No more news line on the home page
- No more contact information via MSN, Yahoo, etc in your profile
- Layout modifications (small) to various pages

There is more simplification and adjustments in the pipeline, but I'll need to find the time for it. I also have a book I wanted to write on competent people. You'll be the first to hear about new changes. And I'm open to suggestions.

Labels: about2findout

About two years ago, I started this project and blog. My aim was to find out what all this 2.0 talk was about, and try a 'learning 2.0 something' myself. The term 2.0 now has become mainstream and some of its features are here to stay. The site turned out to be a trivia site, and it was great fun building it the first year and growing it the second year. I've done it as a hobby, and now it is time to start other hobbies.

The site will stay.
But it won't change as much as it has in the last year. I never got around to make an API or other ways to integrate the quizzes in other sites. Maybe in the future, but I'm not promising anything. I also won't promote it with Google Ads anymore or create a lot of new quizzes myself, so it's up to the community now to keep it alive.

Here is the most recent quiz I made:


As for me, I'll start up a new hobby in 2009, under the umbrella of my 6C learning philosophy. I decided to write a book, called Homo Competens, about competent people in the information age. If that new hobby of mine interests you, please keep an eye on my new blog : homocompetens.blogspot.com.

Labels: homocompetens, learning

I just chaired a knowledge exchange session with a table full of people here at the Online Educa Berlin conference. It was about my hobby for the past year and so: this site. As you are reading this blog, you are probably familiar with my experiment to create 'something learning 2.0', so I will not cover the setup of the site. I had different cards on the table with topics the people could choose from. As I have no secrets about that, here is what was shared:

- SOCIAL SIMPLE STYLE
These have been the guiding mottos for making the site. I especially struggled with style, as I'm not any good at graphical design. Luckily there are free sites around to generate logo's or background colors. Other things: don't make your site's visitors feel alone on any page, and stick what the basics of what web sites do. It's what people understand.

- IF YOU BUILD IT, WILL THEY COME?
No. Just building and having a site will do no good. By far the most traffic was generated to the site by Google advertisements. (see further). But there was also word of mouth. Especially helpful was the listing in the Museum of Modern Beta's blog, killerstartups.com, and a few other sites that list new web 2.0 applications. Post your site to del.icio.us, make YouTube video of it, Stumble it (the biggest single day traffic was because one day the site was featured on StumbleUpon),... Furthermore, I get a lot of repeat traffic by the Friday Quizday newsletter.

- OpenID
Was to difficult to implement when I started building the site, but now there are both enough providers for it, as components to hook into your site. It lowers the threshold of people to register or login to your site.

- TECHNICALITIES
I have chosen asp.net with ajax. But there is no philosophy or religion involved in that choice. Good sites can be made with Java, PHP, Flash, asp.net, ruby... or anything else. Just go with what you feel best with or have the most experience or affinity with. I also host this site on seekdotnet.com. A few times the site has been down, but hey, you can't expect miracles for 20$ a month, and that's ok for a hobby site. I used as much as possible free tools and all the web 2.0 goodies around : RSS feeds, tag clouds, links to people, permanent beta, star rating, ...

- READ / WRITE
Read: there are 881 registered users on the site, a fraction of the 48000 visits this year that were mostly anonymous. Write: From those 800+ people, only 39 have created questions, which is about 4%. That is not a lot. Is creating questions to hard to do? It takes more than uploading a picture or typing in a single line of text... Or do quizzers like to consume more than they contribute? Of the 39, only 10 are very active contributors. But all in all, I prefer to have a few good contributors, than a lot of people who put nonsense or bad quality trivia on the site.

- THE NUMBERS
The site after 1 year has 186 quizzes, 881 users and 1907 questions. The top countries are USA, India, Philippines, UK, Belgium. In total 48000 visits were logged.

- PURPOSE
For long the site lacked a purpose, apart from just gaining points and having an accuracy. But the hall of fame and the League of Smartiepants overcomes that: now you can grow your smartiepants color like the belts of karate. Highest score after one year is 3697 points. Most popular quizzes are on capitals, english and IQ.

- LEARNING SITE IN DISGUISE
This is always intended as a learning project, although most people see it as a game. And that's intentional. Asking and reflecting on questions is a very natural form of learning, and there are little things that underline the learning nature of the site: first time you get an answer wrong, nothing happens and you just can read the feedback, more information, relevant links, etc. When a month or more later you get the same question wrong again, points go off. So learning is rewarded. The challenge feature where you bet your points on others not knowing things has proven less popular than foreseen. But a lot of people have told me they learn a lot while playing the quizzes, and that's the whole point anyway.

- BREAKING OUT OF THE SITE
I've created FriendsIQ on Facebook, a mobile application and a Google Gadget to bring the content outside the site's boundaries. I never found the time to create an API, but maybe the future will bring that... On the mobile application: it is not a very visited part of the site inspite of all the buzz about mobile applications. It looks like an iPhone application, but actually is a regular web site technology. There is not one single standard to develop for mobile phones, it is different for Nokia, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android, ... As the newer generation mobiles has found ways to make normal web pages work on their device, that's a safer choice and one a hobbiest can afford.

- ADVERTISING
I use Google Adsense and Adwords. Adsense is the program where you earn money by showing advertisements on your site. Every time someone clicks on the advertisement above the questions, I get 1c or more. In total so far I have earned 318$ the last 1,5 year in advertising income. That doesn't cover the 20$ a month I pay for hosting. I also use Adwords, which is paying for advertisements on other sites to convince people to visit my site. I have turned ads on and off regularly, and spend in total 418 euro to get 20241 clicks and 11 million impressions. It's a hobby, it costs what a hobby costs...

- MAKING QUESTIONS WITH EASE
I put a lot of effort in making the Author Zone as easy as I could while still assuring quality trivia. The difficulty level of questions is for example automatically adjusted. And the fill in the blank question type tries to be a bit more intelligent than just comparing what your types with the provided answer. The input type also restricts you from answering with a wrong type of answer (like a number, date, one word or more, etc), and if your answer resembles close enough, you get a second chance.

Well, that's the most we talked about that I can remember...

Labels: about2findout.com, oeb08, tomatoes are fruit

Berlin, it's that time of year again! For the fifth time, I'll be attending the annual Online Educa Berlin conference, Europe's biggest conference on e-learning. I've arrived in Berlin a few days ago and am looking forward to a good conference. It's not snowing here (yet?), but the Christmas markets are selling their 1/2 meter bratwurst. I also realise that quite some people that I usually meet here won't make it this year, which is a shame (ill, other job, no travel budget this year,...) .

My current planning for the conference:
- Wednesday I attend a workshop by Jay Cross on his new book 'learnscape', or how to make the learning ecosystem for informal learning work (I think).
- Thursday I'm hosting a knowledge exchange session on my hobby project 'about2findout.com': all things people want to know on building a social web application for learning. It's at 16h30.
- Friday at the end of the conference I'll be chairing the 'battle of the bloggers', where a panel of bloggers will give their views on this years conference.

Labels: berlin, online educa

I've been running Google Ads for 3 euro a day for the whole month, and it paid off. November was a record month, although I haven't had the time to do much myself or make a lot of quizzes as I was travelling India on a tour.

There were 11578 visits resulting in 112233 pages being viewed. The top visiting countries were India, Philippines, USA, UK and Vietnam.

Labels: about2findout.com

In October, the number of visits dropped to 4485 (from 8932 last month). The difference is that last month I had Google ads running all month, and this month I did not advertise or promote at all. So I consider this the 'natural' visits. Most came from the USA.

One big exception: on Oct 18 we had the highest peak off all time (over 1200). I didn't even know the site could cope with that much traffic :-). The reason is that that day by coincidence StumbleUpon must have featured us, as it's all Stumble traffic. So not counting for that means 3200 visits a month without promotion, which isn't bad.

Oh, and this month I'll run ads again.

Labels: about2findout.com

FriendsIQ is a social quiz application you can find on Facebook here. It tests your FriendsIQ, which is the sum of what you know plus what your friends know.



How does it work?

On the main screen you see your own score (a FriendsIQ is expressed as x = y + z with x your total score, y what you answered, and z what your friends answered for you. You also see how much you gave and up to 10 friends of you gave to other users.

Below the logo is the main menu to get you to the about page, and the questions page. On the welcome screen you also see outstanding help requests from friends who delegated a question to you.

On the questions page, you see your 5 questions, or at least a short version of it. You have the option to solve it yourself, or ask a friend. If you ask a friend the request is valid for one week. After that you can generate a new question with the 'new question' button. You also get to see up to 5 oustanding help requests from your friends.

Every time a question is answered correctly or wrongly by either you or a friend, the background color will show, and you can generate the next question.


On the question page, you have one of 5 types of questions taken from the about2findout.com site. At the bottom you see if you are answering the question for yourself or for a friend. Every correct answer gains a point, every wrong answer subtracts a point.

I hope you all have great fun finding out your friendsIQ!

Labels: about2findout.com, friendsiq

I've been working on a Facebook application that uses trivia questions from this site. I intended it to be a real social application, so not just another way of doing trivia quizzes on your own just like you can do on about2findout. It's called FriendsIQ, and it tests the combined smarts of yourself and your network of friends, and above all your capability to know what to ask to who.

I found that debugging a social application takes more time than debugging a regular one, specially since you're not allowed to have a multitude of Facebook users to test with. I'm still working on some bugs.

There are two ways to create a Facebook application: in FBML (Facebook's own markup language) or via an iframe. An iframe is basically a piece of the browser window that gets its content from an independent other site. And that's what I used. So on FriendsIQ, what you see is actually pages that are on my own site about2findout.com within the Facebook canvas. Either way you first have to register your application on Facebook and apply for an application and secret key. (And that is fast and free.)

As the site is written in asp.net, I needed components to create Facebook applications on that platform. I wasted a day trying to get the Facebook Toolkit to work. It's an open source project on Codeplex, and a further evolution of Microsoft's toolkit. And it might be a great thing, but it's just too damn hard for a non-die hard programmer to get it to work, specially since Facebook itself has changed quite a lot. The samples don't work, and there is no documentation to get you started. You need to search for hours on the internet to figure out how it works. So I leave the toolkit for those who know how to read the source code and figure it all out, and switched to the much simpler Facebook.NET, also hosted as an open source on Codeplex. I got the major things working, although the new way of handling feed messages is not supported in this project (yet).

Here are some links that really saved me hours of headaches and got me started:
http://www.stevetrefethen.com/blog/VSNETStarterKitForNikhilKotharisFacebookNET.aspx
http://www.nikhilk.net/FacebookNET.aspx
http://www.marketing-ninja.com/old-stuff/why-im-switching-to-facebooknet-from-the-facebook-developers-toolit/
http://www.marketing-ninja.com/old-stuff/5-facebooknet-development-tips/

Labels: about2findout.com, facebook, facebook.net, friendsiq

I'm on holiday this week, so after our 3 night trip to visit Bucharest (I made a quiz on it), I found some time to create the League of Smartypants!
The site has lacked a purpose for a long time. Every game needs a goal and just the most points is not enough to stimulate most people. So from today onwards, you can earn a color in the League of Smartypants. The colors are similar to the belts in karate or judo. You automatically get a new Smartypants grade when you comply with the prerequisites for it. For now blue is the top color, with brown and black reserved for future use once the site grows.

	White	You need 100 points.
	Yellow	You need 200 points.
	Orange	You need 500 points and need to have authored 10 questions.
	Green	You need 1000 points and need to have authored 20 questions.
	Blue	You need 2000 points and need to have authored 50 questions.
	Brown	Not available yet.
	Black	Not available yet.

Labels: about2findout, smartypants

Yahoo has a lot of experience optimizing image size for web sites. An image such as your logo that is just smaller in size but as good in visibility can save a lot of bandwidth, and make your site load faster. Yahoo now put their expertise available via the site smuchit.com. On that site you can upload or point to images, and they will get optimised.

I tried it on my site's images and got 23% improvement. It's a free tool.

Labels: images, smushit, Yahoo

September was a record month. Top day was 25th September with 485 visitors. In total there were 8932 visits, with an average of almost 10 pages per visit. Lots of new registered users too.

It didn't come about just like that: the top weeks I had Google Ads running for 4 euro per day. Just the same, I'm very glad with the results. But it does show the limits of the site, some of the top days I noticed the site was down for 15 minutes because of the higher traffic.

This month I won't run any advertisements, just to see what is left when not promoting the site.

Labels: about2findout.com, google analytics

Today I experimented with Windows Live authentication. Microsoft has opened up its enormous 'Live' database of accounts (like hotmail.com or live.com), for other sites to use to log in users. It's the successor of MS Passport and free this time. There are more than 350 million Live accounts out there.

It's not like OpenID at all, but since I've implemented that yesterday, I enlarged the concept to also include Live ID Authentication. On the login page you can now choose to login with your traditional about2findout account, an OpenID or a Live ID.

To enable your site for Live ID authentication, you need to register first at Microsoft's site. You need to have the name of the application and a secret key, and where to send the response back.
On your site, you need to include the login button (an iframe script), and retrieve the userid that the Live ID server sends back to you on the page you specified during registration. Use the code from the free Web Authentication SDK.
Because that is all you get: if a user succesfully logs on with their Live ID, you won't get anything but a unique UserID. That means it is up to your site to get email, a friendly username, and other settings you might need. That UserID you can then use to store user information and de the normal login. The way I've implemented it, I store the UserID I get from the LiveID server in my users table, and create a regular account for them behind the screen. Much like I've done for the OpenID implementation in my previous post.

Useful links:
- Peter Bromberg's blog
- public Info Tech blog
- MSDN

PS At the moment, openid and live id are only implemented at the about3findout experimental site, they'll come to the main site when all testing is done.

Labels: about2findout.com, liveid

What is OpenID?
OpenID is an open, vendor neutral way of signing into web sites via one single account. No longer do you need to remember passwords for every single site (such as about2findout), but you can use your OpenID with all participating websites. An OpenID looks like a URL. You might actually have an OpenID already without knowing, as Flickr, Yahoo, Blogger and various other accounts can be used as OpenID. On a participating website, just provide your OpenID URL. You will be redirected to the OpenID provider (Yahoo, MyOpenID, Blogger, Flickr) for the normal signin, and redirected back to about2findout. For more information on OpenID, have a look at: http://openid.net/.

I've been looking at OpenID when first thinking about this site now two years ago, but at that time things were too complicated for me to incorporate that into an asp.net site. I'm not a die hard programmer, I need ready-made components I can plugin. Now I deemed the time right to add OpenID support to the site, as there is an excellent open source tool for adding it to asp.net sites : dotnetopenid. I still had a few more strange and exotic bugs and struggled 2 days with it, but I think I got it working OK now.

I've got about2findout.com to accept OpenID logins as well as our own accounts (the own a2fo accounts will not go away, this is just a new way of signing in). On the login page, there will be an additional box for your OpenID URL. If it is the first time you login via OpenID, you will be asked to accept the code of conduct and provide or confirm your e-mail address. As many users of the site have Yahoo accounts, I hope this will get more new visitors to login and gather points as there is no more need to set up a separate account.

Technically speaking
- I used the dotnetopenid latest version (2.5 at the time of writing). I experimented with the login box they provide, but that won't go together on the same login page as the traditional asp.net one, so I did the OpenID login programatically.

- There were two articles I found VERY useful, and recommend you to read them if you want to do something similar: Dan Hounshells blog and Andrew Jones' blog.

- I created myself a free MyOpenID.com account for testing.

- The documentation is not clear on that, but the dotnetopenid State object that can store the information you get back from the openid provider only works when you copy the state.aspx file to the app_code folder.

- The dotnetopenid login component works well, but gives error in a multilingual site like mine. I usually bind properties to language resources, but that gave strange behaviors with this component, so I didn't use it further.

- The xrds.asp link on the home page gave strange errors about header cannot be modified. Turns out the xrdspublisher by default does its magic via headers and that screws up the page refreshing I have implemented in Ajax on the main page. (The main page shows a new question every 30 seconds.) So I changed the mode of that component and it worked.

- You cannot rely on getting extra information back from the OpenID provider. That's why I redirect to a 'complete registration' page for new OpenID logins. At a minimum, I need everyone to agree with the house rules of the site. Once they confirm, a regular asp.net account is created for them in the normal way, with a random password.

- I'm using the javascript from IDSelector.com to get a nicer OpenID box. The JavaScript makes it easier for people to enter the correct URL. Most people will have an OpenID without knowing. The only big site missing in the whole OpenID movement is the traditional one: Microsoft with the competing LiveID.

As for now, the code has been released to the test site about3findout.com. When it works well with all kind of OpenID accounts, I'll release it to the main site about2findout.com.

Labels: about2findout.com, dotnetopenid, openid

It has been a record week for the site: we passed 160 quizzes, someone scored 1187 points in one week time (anandvymutt423), and two days ago we had 478 visitors, which is a new day record. Glad to see so many people like the site and contribute their questions.

Here are the latest quizzes:





http://www.about2findout.com/findout/doquiz_7of9.aspx?quiz=ASYER

Labels: about2findout.com

Google released its own web browser, called Google Chrome. So I installed it (very easy), and used it to check the site about2findout.com. It works. Actually, it should as Google uses Firefox technology and other open source products behind the sobre screens. 

Labels: browser, chrome

I've experimented with Google Gadgets. Gadgets are little pieces of web applications that you can plug into your personalized home page such as iGoogle or add to the Google sidebar.

The one I made simply lists a random trivia question, taken from the about2findout.com database, and refreshes it every 5 minutes. If you hover over the questions you get the full question and question type, and there's a button to show another random question. Plain and simple.
Clicking on the question will open a new browser window on the site itself where you can do the question as you usually would. I choose not to implement the answering logic in the gadget itself because that would make things much more complicated, and I need people to go to the site to answer questions otherwise I loose all statistics and tracking of answer questions.

There is a very nice tutorial on creating Google Gadgets here:
http://www.seoish.com/how-to-make-google-gadgets/
I especially like the interactive part where you add gadgets with video explanation next to the Google Gadget editor. Google Gadgets are nothing more than xml files that describe the gadget's properties and logic. The logic can either be written in javascript, or redirected to another URL, and that last option is what I've done. It saves me the trouble of having to rewrite everything in javascript, but especially allows for people that are logged in to keep their credentials via the normal way. There is more detail on Google's Code site on creating and publishing gadgets.

This is the first of what I hope will be many ways to open up the site to the rest of the web. About2findout.com was never meant to be a locked database. After the screens, I've implemented a module to randomly generate 20 questions every minute. It's that module that feeds the Google Gadget and any other way of sharing I'll add in the future. It keeps the calculations on the site down (although I don't know how this behaves under heavy traffic), and avoids bots to suck out all questions and answers from the site. There are only 20 questions per minute. Should be enough for the real people among us.

To check out the Gadget or add it to your page:
Add to iGoogle
Add to webpage

Labels: about2findout.com, gadget, googlegadget

On widgetbox.com, you can create and share widgets. Widgets are small parts of web pages that you can insert in your site, blog, personal homepage such as iGoogle or NetVibes or social site such as Facebook.

Creating the widget based on the RSS feed of my quiz site was fairly easy. Not sure what I can do with the widget now, but hey, at least I have a widget shared with the world :-).

Labels: about2findout.com, widget

We passed the 1500 questions mark on the site today!

Labels: about2findout.com