Last year, I ran a survey on this blog to get some feedback from IZ readers. Two hundred of you were kind enough to put in some time and thought into this. Here are some of the results, some comments on your comments, and some answers to frequently asked questions.
1. What do people think of IZ?
(thanks! even to the person honest enough to admit s/he hated it!)
and are the questions interesting?
3.50% of you showed interest in getting a weekly email digest. That's something we will offer soon.
4. About 60% of you also said you'd like to to contribute guest questions to the blog: watch out for an announcement on this later this week.
5. About 2/3rds of respondents would like a copy of the year's questions - that is also something we should be able to offer this year.
And now for some user questions:
- Why are the questions only about current affairs? Um, this is a current affairs quiz blog, isn't it? Tautological answers aside, topics from recent times are a good lens to learn about the world, past-present-future, and even non-quizzers relate well to topical events. Hopefully, other forums, online and offline, can fulfill your need for topics from other timelines.
- Is there a better way to post the questions on Twitter & Facebook? Yes, the daily automated postings on Facebook and Twitter are truncated and don't look very good. I'm working on a better way to deliver these snippets there. Ideas welcome too.
- And the mobile version of the site sucks. Yes. Working on that too.
- Can you do more than one question per day? Not for now. I think a question a day suits most people's information dietary needs for now!
- Can you not post the answer until the end of the day?/I'd like to attempt the question without having access to the answer: The blog has been deliberately designed this way because most people don't like having to come back another time for the answers. But perhaps some day, we will have a “Game” mode complementing the current design.
- Why is there no “did not like it” option on the blog? We assume that if you were not moved to click the “like” option for a question, you either didn't like it or didn't find it remarkable. For us, that's all we want to know. So if you did find it remarkable, go ahead, click that option.
- Do live quizzes. But I already do them, don't I? Unless you meant a live IZ quiz. Perhaps some day.
- Do you know your questions are plagiarised by other people? Yes, despite the fact that the questions are anyway free to be used provided due credit is given to this blog (see this post). But content plagiarism is so prevalent on the web that it's taken for granted. So the only thing we do is to try and call it out whenever we see it.
What next? I'm putting up a simplified version of the survey as a permanent feedback form (you can find it on the right sidebar of the blog). Use it to comment, observe, vent, praise, frown, reward, and much more.
And there's Mark Antony week coming up. Starting tomorrow.
Once again, thanks for all the time.
Ramanand