maandag, december 29, 2008
Closure
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.
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
donderdag, december 04, 2008
Knowledge Exchange at Online Educa
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...
- 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
dinsdag, december 02, 2008
Berlin, here we are again
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.
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
New record: 11578 visitors in November
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
