The Crooners quiz

The Shakespeare quiz had 14 people complete it. However over 30 people looked at the front page…. was it too intimidating?  Highest score was 7.

Well I’m enjoying doing them so here’s another:

The Crooner Quiz

I’ll get back to posting articles about pop music and intranets soon. But I think there is an interesting lesson about return of investment here.

The concept that got me thinking about quizzes was the puzzle about the time it takes to create content versus how much it engages people, what’s the best effort to value ratio?

If I just wrote a bunch of stuff about 40s crooners in text it would have a low creation cost, it would be fine for reference – but it wouldn’t really engage anybody, if I made a multimedia extravaganza it could take days and days – and that would be for each time I did it.

I recorded roughly how I wrote this one.

5:45 Decide to do a new quiz, argue with my wife for ten minutes about which subject to do, she’s not keen on “mid 80s industrial post punk”.

5.55 Decide to do “Crooners”. Make a start by reading wikipedia and I cut and paste interesting trivia into a text editor.

6.10 Am reminded its my turn to make the tea.

6.55 Get back to the computer, I edit my snippets into questions, grab some images from wikipedia too.

7.00 Finish draft text version which I show to my wife, she’s doesn’t think Johnny Mathis is a crooner and so I replace him, she thinks we should have a Paul Anka question but I can’t find anything interesting to say about him.

7.10 Pasted all the questions to my quiz edit form and its live.

So by my reckoning that’s 30 minutes writing and less that 10 minutes ‘publishing’ now that I’ve written a quiz editor, and even that was longer than it needed to be because, well, I kept getting distracted with reading other things in wikipedia… did you know it was Bing Crosby’s daughter who shot JR? Plus I had the down time of making the tea, and you can’t really have a ‘is Johnny Mathis a crooner’ debate in less than five minutes…

OK so maybe the crooner quiz isn’t the most interesting thing ever written, but it is quite a good effort to engagement ratio… Well it will be once I write a quiz on something people are interested in.

Let me know how you got on with the quiz in the comments – obviously you can boast about your high scores too.

I was going to add in a you tube video of early 80s Edinburgh teen pop/punk group The Questions, but I can’t find any, they were signed to Paul Wellers record label ‘respond’ and backed Tracy who had a hit with ‘the house that jack built’. Its perhaps just as well I din’t find anything, I have a terrible feeling they weren’t nearly as good as I remember.