Newzwag Blog

The lowdown on Motown ... Newzwag goes live on Freep.com

2009-05-13T00:25:50Z

We've been up and running on SFGate.com for months, and in early May Newzwag's News, Sports and Entertainment quizzes went live on Freep.com, the website of the Detroit Free Press. And the hits keep coming!

We're out of the gate at SF Gate!

2009-02-02T23:54:32Z

The Newzwag General News Quiz has gone live on the San Francisco Chronicle's website, SF Gate. It joins our Entertainment and Sports quizzes, which kicked off at SF Gate in February. All three can be accessed down at the botton of the SF Gate front page, near Sudoku!

All three operate under the same rules and principles as our Deadline quiz on Facebook and our news quizzes elsewhere: pile up points, move up through the levels, challenge your friends, and show everyone who's the brainiac here.

You'll see a jump in the number of questions based on movies, music, hoops ... well, yeah, entertainment and sports. And we have some crossover among quizzes, so you'll sometimes see the same question across platforms. Heck, that gives you a chance to rack up extra points cheap! So play 'em all!

We let you comment. Now we ...

2009-01-24T00:39:28Z

Our development team set up a commenting system for our quiz(zes) outside of Facebook (sorry Deadliners ...). It's currently on our "general" news quiz, but it will also be a feature on our Entertainment Quiz and Sports Quiz (coming soon!). The commenting system allows users to comment on individual questions. There was quiet a bit of thought put into how long comments should be and how we'd manage foul-mouthed $*#(@^%)!#%.

Censoring user comments happens on every major news site, though strategies differ. Other than b****, f*** and a**, is there really a consensus on what is horrible enough to be censored out? For example, the NYT mobile app used to censor out the word "gay," but we left it in. And you b****** are so clever, you'll find hundreds of ways around our censoring anyhow. (BTW, we settled for using $&#(*!) symbols for our bleeping, instead of asterisks)

Currently, the general news quiz can be found on newstrust.net. We didn't get too many comments, and surprisingly(!) few obscene ones. There were even a couple instances where users responded to each other's comments.

We were hoping for feedback on the news quiz, and we got some. A user complained about there being too many entertainment questions, while another user asked "why not call this 'sports quiz'?"

We love the feedback (... really, we do). We scaled back the number of sports and entertainment questions in the general quiz (very similar to the Deadline quiz), sticking to only big events (freebie: yes, the Super Bowl will be in BOTH quizzes).

Sometimes, we get user complaints about being too US-centric. About a year ago, when we really dove into the news quiz as a product, we tried to scale back our US questions and remove sports coverage. But as a company, we've really come to grips with the understanding that you really can't please everyone, and our target market is mostly in North America.

We definitely aren't trying to alienate anyone. There have been more US-based questions, mostly because of the US election/inauguration; now that they're over, the flood of Obamarama questions should slow and lead to slightly fewer US questions.

The 2008 Year In Review

2008-12-16T23:59:08Z

It's that time of year agaaain! From Dec. 20-31, we'll be releasing 10 questions a day into our news quiz looking back at notable events of 2008. That's 12 months of goodness totaling 120 questions.

For anyone disconnecting over the holidays, the year in review questions will stay live through Jan. 5.

Scaling Rails

2008-11-24T18:19:17Z

Last Wednesday we hosted a Newzwag classroom for a group of 25 Ruby developers who came to eat delicious pizza, drink beer, and learn how we scaled Rails. I personally had a lot of fun putting together the presentation and hosting the guys that showed up.

I presented an overview talk about database gotchas, and how to load test a session-based app. Daniel talked about his unique implementation of memcached as a temporary data store and bulk write mechanism.

The presentations were informed by all of our hands-on experience adapting our write-heavy quiz from it's capacity of 200 simultaneous users all the way up to 30,000 simultaneous users (a 25x efficiency upgrade!). Rails does scale, and just like any other app, requires custom software and hardware solutions to match a project's needs. Throwing hardware at it is the first solution, but analyzing each and every bottleneck all adds up.

We fully intended to record the whole event, but alas we were video camera-challenged... sorry!

Here's a link to the talks ~~on Slideshare~~, click to download the pdf file.

Links from the talks:

If you have any questions, post 'em up in the comments.

QuizMe: New Player Skill Rating

2008-11-21T19:26:51Z

Thanks to Daniel, there will be a new world order on our quiz's leaderboard. In his own words (mostly), here's how our new play skill rating will work:

Currently, we rank players by the total number of points earned. After seeing the results of our different trials online, it was obvious that a major problem with using the total number of points was that it is largely dependent on the number of questions answered. It would only be an accurate comparison between users that have answered a similar number of questions.

Other flawed measures: Point average and percent correct -- both ignore the difficulty of a question and percent correct ignores how fast a question is answered.

Our new skill rating addressees all of these problems. Similar to the Elo rating system, our skill rating system takes into account a number of factors to determine how good a player is at answering questions.

The system works something like this:

Each player starts with a skill rating of 1500. Whenever a player answers a question, their current skill rating is compared to the difficulty rating of the question (which is determined by how other people answered the same question) to determine what the expected score for this particular user answering this particular question is. This predicted score is then compared to the score the player actually earned, and the player's rating is adjusted up or down depending on if the player scores higher or lower than expected.

For those of you who are interested in the actual formula:

To determine the expected score:

P = Player's rating before answering the question
Q = The questions difficulty rating

Expected score = 1 / (1 + 10^((Q-P)/800))

The adjustment to the players rating is made with the following equation:

P = Players original rating
E = expected score
S = actual score
K = a scaler that is dependent on the number of questions a player has answered: it ranges from 25 for new players to 10 for players who have answered a lot of questions.

New player rating = P + K(S - E)

Newzwag <3 Ruby

2008-11-18T18:49:24Z

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

2008-11-17T23:02:26Z

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

2008-11-04T22:18:36Z

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.

2008-10-27T18:43:41Z

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

2008-10-21T18:30:24Z

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'

2008-10-21T18:29:10Z

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.

2008-10-14T21:50:18Z

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

2008-10-01T23:57:13Z

Day in and day out, our entire Newzwag staff is tracking down each and every news tidbit you might find interesting (Example: "Japanese Aquarium Puts Dolphins on Weight-Loss Program").

And because of this constant hunt for news, we inevitably run into US election coverage every 6 nano-seconds (Seriously, I can't go buy a pack of smokes without running into 9 people trying to register me to vote - am Canadian, can't vote, stop asking me you hipster idiot).

So it's only natural that after being bombarded by constant coverage of the 2008 presidential election, that we decided to create an entire quiz devoted to the lengthy and intricate maze that is the crazy world of presidential politics.

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

2008-08-14T18:51:31Z

We are now live on ESPN too. Yipeeeeeeeee!

Take our Olympics quiz and challenge your friends.