Harish Palaniappan's

Recently I received an email from Mani Satya Samuel Jayaprakash Santosh. He is a friend of mine.. No, not a grammatical mistake, all that is one person's name.. and he is one of the top 5 long email id guys at cognizant, my last office. We obviously shortened it and called him JP.
While as you may expect we all often make lots of fun on that name, its one really really secular name. hmm. may be not too really because it lacks a muslim part.

I hope JP is not going to look for me after reading one full paragraph about his name here.. agreeably way too much of it. Ok. I will quickly move on to the email he sent.

It was about Portal India Quiz .. and he had marked me to see who was the winner of round 10.

Both the quiz site, and the name of the winner of round 10 excited me.

For, JP was the winner of round 10.. ,
and,
the quiz had an interesting flow, where the person who answers a question, gets to ask the next question. Isn't it more interesting when we can question others and they have to answer. Feels like you are taller than the others.. atleast as long as they figure out the answer. And for obvious reasons, people go to extraordinary effort to use their brains when they know its someone else who is to take the pain searching for the answer.

I have been through this flow before when we quiz each other at college or get-to-gether's, but going through it on the internet, and importantly on Wikipedia, was very exciting.

For any web person, or software programmer, wiki is a cute little, but powerfully big software for content editing and management. And they give it free for community's sake.

No mention of its features or introduction may be neccessary, because everybody sometime must have known that the software world goes ga-ga over wiki, next to google search. For starters though, one aspect should tell it all, that, whatever you see in wikipedia with all its categories and inner pages, can be setup in just a few mins of using the software (except for the content which many users have to start posting).

So, it was exciting to know that this interactive quiz, was one of those many things that you can do with a wiki... and probably only with a wiki you could play quizmaster to make 1000's of unknown people on the web.

You can see / participate in the Quiz here: Portal:India / Quiz

Since its online, and people have time, we could say many get their answers googling for it, but the questions don't sound like any search program in google will know that one. But by the way the questions are, and the way people have explained their answers, this quiz rocks.

One thing.. that I didn't understand though was,
some rounds of the quiz had more questions than the others.. . may be probably it took more to make a winner because everyone was scoring. I didnt understand still whether that was the reason.