Newzwag <3 Ruby

Josh, our Lead Developer, has volunteered to talk and host The SF Ruby Meetup Group right here at our Maiden Lane headquarters tomorrow night. Daniel thinks he's off the hook, but he'll be there, too. The subject of the meeting will be Scaling Rails in which he'll talk about our experience (and by this I mean our development team) scaling our quiz during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

BTW: I was really tempted to write "I <3 Rubyes" as the headline but I guess I'll leave that for a custom print t-shirt. :)

To Like, or Not to Like, That Is the Question

More quiz features coming soon...

We've added a couple of new features to our development pipeline. They include commenting and question rating, allowing players to comment on a particular question/ answer/ topic and also allowing them to rate questions up or down, like or not like respectively. The first will help users connect with each other as comments will link to user profiles. The latter will allow our hard-working editors and our algorithms to serve better questions in the future. Until then, we'll keep you in the loop.

A Vote of Confidence

Big day in the U.S. today ... The whole world is paying attention to what may be the most important presidential election in recent history. Though at this time the race is not over, it's clear that the Internet has played a central role the 2008 campaign and positions itself as a big (huge) winner. It's possible that this view from our San Francisco-based office is slightly subjective, but there is no doubt that the access to real-time information and mobile devices have encouraged people to participate, speak up, act, share, link, comment, connect.

We're happy to be part of this.

In the past month, our 2008 Elections Quiz has gotten noticed in a few client sites around the States: The Detroit Free Press, The Washington Times and the Miami Herald. Across sites, more than 10,000 new player accounts have been created... People from different party lines have given our quiz their vote of confidence by playing for hours at a time and for more than 30 minutes on average. No, we're not kidding. :)

We've been checking out our stats between the sites running the Election Quiz and it's interesting to note that though Democrats overall beat out Republicans on the Detroit Free Press and the Miami Herald sites in percentage of answers correct, percentage-wise Republicans on the Washington Times site beat out all groups on all sites.

In terms of questions, most of you did not know that Harry Truman (and not George Bush) had the lowest approval ratings in the history of the US presidency. Give 'em hell, Harry's rating was all of 22%, compared to Dubya's 24% from this September. The hardest question was that William Taft fared the worst in seeking re-election. The guy only had 8 electoral votes in 1912!

Many of the most difficult questions were historical trivia, but fun tidbits from the candidates, like Joe Biden claiming to never have had a drink, proved fairly difficult as well. Though a few questions were answered correctly by all users, there weren't any questions that all of you got wrong (rats!).

No one got all 50 buttons, but "mark b," an Independent immortalized on Mount Rushmore on the Detroit Free Press came the closest with 49.

The Race Goes On: Now in Florida.

Our 2008 Election Quiz is gaining some exposure (very mucho muy welcome) as it goes live in the Sunshine State at the Miami Herald. It's great timing as Florida takes center stage heading into the final week of the presidential campaign.

The Washington Times Accepts the Challenge

Another Web site is live with our 2008 Election Quiz, this time on the East Coast. The client is the Washington Times and you can test your political IQ here.

So, now we're wondering how they'll fare against the Midwest users over at the Detroit Free Press. We hope that the West Coast sites come aboard soon, too. Hint, hint!

Our Elections Quiz 'Wordle'

At times when our attention span escapes we stumble upon fun / cool / interesting things... since we're all talking elections and more elections, an Elections wordle is in order :)

Image of http://wordle.net/

Political junkie? US history buff? Trivia lover? Read. This.

It's live. Our 2008 US Election Quiz is live. Show off your campaign knowledge and pick up some US history trivia along the way over here.

We launched Oct. 7 with 200 questions and have been adding 10 new ones six days a week. We plan to keep that up right up to election day.

The quiz is similar to Deadline and the Olympics one but we've introduced the idea of campaign buttons, which you collect as you move up the ranks. You can modify your profile settings to display a button in your collection, too.

You'll be off to a good start if you've been watching the debates since we've created a good chunk of questions based on the debates. And don't forget that we gave a you a few freebies in our last post.

The Crazy World of Presidential Politics - Newzwag Style

To be sure, this has been no easy task. If you think politicians are good at not answering journalists' questions, try creating questions based off those non-answers. Miraculously, we have managed to accomplish this monstrous feat.

And just to entice you, Dear Reader, here a few kernels of presidential-awesome we've learned while creating our new quiz:

• Eisenhower ruined the original cork floor of the Oval Office because he wore his spiked golf shoes constantly
• John Quincy Adams used to swim naked in the Potomac
• They had to build another bathtub in the White House because Taft was so fat
• Joe Biden wrongly declared that both FDR and television were prominent during the stock market crash of 1929
• George W. Bush was a cheerleader at Andover Academy
• LBJ used to hold meeting in the bathroom while he used the facilities

And on top of all that, we've even got questions on issues ("It's the economy, stupid"), the workings of government (apparently the Electoral College is NOT a school for would-be politicians), and day-to-day election coverage (another candidate mangled the English language!).

So stay tuned for the debut of our totally super awesome, and always informative/fun/hilarious Newzwag 2008 Presidential Election Quiz.

Take our Quiz on ESPN's Olympic Central

We are now live on ESPN too. Yipeeeeeeeee!

Take our Olympics quiz and challenge your friends.

Editorial Marathon: This team knows everything about the Games

By: (Bo) and [Rob] and <Sara>

The only way I MIGHT lose a bar trivia night that has an Olympics category is if I'm playing against Rob Ready [and he is still standing upright without slurring his speech]. Why? Because this editorial team knows everything, EVERYTHING [seriously, like everything] there is to know about the Olympics--Olympic history, why Francisco Lazaro didn't finish the 1912 Games (he died), how Olympic basketball isn't the same as NBA basketball (something only Tony would know), and which googly-eyed mascot belongs where <"I can't help it. I like cute.">. We've got it down. But it's been a marathon of a process (ask Tom).

I knew nothing about sports or the athletes for Beijing 2008 when we were told, "Make Olympic questions for an Olympic quiz." It was a painstaking, fact-checking, guessing, brain-racking process, all of which lead up to one question: What is interesting about the Olympics?

Then it turned into a "What is true about the Olympics?" What do you mean the 1980 Moscow Games weren't the first to be boycotted? It says so, right here, on the Internets! What do you mean this American isn't competing for America? Americans ALWAYS compete for America ... that's why we're Americans! Yaaaarrrrr!

Breathe. Cry a little. Drink some beer [the latter an ancient Canadian tradition].

And, we're back.

On top of our regular Deadline duties, we've been stockpiling trivia about the Olympics in an attempt to separate out the fanboys jumping on the Olympic '08 bandwagon from the real Olympic hardliner fans [Note: Bo is a total fanboy] (Thanks, Rob). We admit, it's a tough quiz, though from the number of 100% we've seen, you wouldn't know it (people are much smarter than ... well ... me).

Some notes on the Olympics quiz: We kept the politics out of this one. We left them for you in Deadline, but the Oly quiz is sports-flavored, athlete-focused. We also had to write most of the extended answers this time around, so we had to be a little more creative [Response upon being asked to actually write something: "I am illiterate."].

We really couldn't have done it without Tom. He made more Oly questions than all of your other editors (those lazy gits). Also, we can't forget Maureen, our underpaid ("volunteer," we call it) intern this summer who actually went to the library and checked out Olympics books for us (cute).

And the content is amazing and all (thank you, thank you), but our quiz questions wouldn't be half as much fun without the cheats, bling and what-have-you, courtesy of our boys in Dev.
 They've been working strange hours, running back and forth working on stuff while we look on haplessly and feel a little useless (that could just be me). This week has reduced them from our chillax dev gurus to incarcerated, pizza-eating, computer vampires. Mad props and much love, guys. They rock hard.

Anyways, take the quiz. And enjoy the Games.

Live now:

In the US  http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/trivia

In Australia http://media.foxsports.com.au/multimedia/2008/07/olympics-quiz/

In India  http://sify.com/sports/olympics/olympicsQuiz.php

In South Africa http://sport.iafrica.com/beijing2008/quizz/

P.S. Our motto: Citius, Altius, Fortius, Bar Trivius Drinksus