gyaan.in – Page 4

About a year ago, some of the brightest quizzers in the Delhi school quizzing circuit joined forces to launch gyaan.in – and boy have we come far! gyaan.in is holding its first ever quiz at IIT Delhi on 12th June 2010, and yes, it’s free to attend! You can participate solo, or form a team of up to four people. The gyaan.in moderator team has been putting a lot of effort into this and we hope to have incredibly well-organized and researched quiz this Saturday. I think this will be quite a nostalgic moment, for many who will be moving on to university this year after their class 12th Boards – and this is one event where you can meet up and participate for one last time as school quizzers, conducted by some of the best school quizzers in Delhi.

We had a somewhat false start previously of having monthly gyaan.in quiz archives, but that is being restarted now with our brand-new gyaan.in newsletter (which you can sign up for free here). This will feature monthly ‘best of’ quiz archives, and articles written specially for the newsletter by moderators. It’s not just about quizzing! Given that so many of us are football fans and World Cup season is around, the theme of gyaan.in’s first newsletter is going to be World Cup Football. We’ll be pushing out the first newsletter to all subscribers over this weekend, so do join gyaan.in’s mailing list!

gyaandotin-2010-w11to21 — gyaan.in traffic (week 11 to week 21, year 2010)

Over the next few weeks as school quizzing season starts, gyaan.in plans to add new features to the website that will attempt to make it even easier for you to stay in touch with quizzing updates, from multiple sources. Among the ideas we have are SMS updates, mobile-friendly gyaan.in site, calendar of upcoming events, etc. We’re open to other suggestions too!

Sometime later this month, we’ll also be holding an informal meetup, where moderators and members can congregate to discuss the future of the website / community. And the community continues to grow! When your members tell you that gyaan.in is more addictive than Facebook, it speaks a lot about the engaging content that the community is creating! You can see that while we are reaching out to a few hundred unique visitors daily, a majority of them spend a lot of time on the site – as evidenced by the breakdown here (shown in time spent per day), or according the number of page views being generated by our visitors. We owe it to you guys!

So come for gyaan.in’s first quiz on June 12, 2010 if you’re in New Delhi. It’s open for all (not just school quizzers), any team combo goes, we’ll have some

At today’s gyaan.in meetup #1, I had a bit of an “Oh, I didn’t think of that” moment when someone suggested we should put up future invites on Facebook instead of Upcoming.org. Yes folks, gyaan.in meetup #1 was held today in, to borrow the words of Douglas Adams, “in a blaze of no publicity at all”. The odd dog barked. The odd begger outside Costa Coffee motioned towards his tummy and then towards his mouth. In the end, around 8-10 people or so showed up when we were optimistically expecting around 20. Anyway, we had a super phun thyme. Lots of chocolate fondues, wraps, mojitos and expressos – and a lot of discussion over the future of gyaan.in. I occassionally kept butting in with my PJs.

When each of us walked in to Costa Coffee today at Connaught Place, we were a bit shocked to see the whole estabilshment pretty occupied! Costa is generally a cafe which runs on empty and where they’ll roll out a red carpet for you on a slow day (which is pretty much every day) if you show up as a customer. The staff told us that specifically Saturday evening was when Costa Coffee is always occupied. No other day, not even Sunday, do they get as many customers as they get on Saturday evening. This warrants investigation; I’m sure if the Freakonomics guys look into this they’ll find some freakish coincidence linking the Mumbai dabbawallahs to Costa Coffee’s occupancy rate in Delhi on a Saturday.

One thing that we all agreed upon was that we need to take it up a notch. Sure, the response within these past two months has been amazing, but we can always do better. We have a good following online (thanks to all visitors of gyaan.in!) and we need to take this further. In the near future, we plan to do a lot more publicity by tieing up with school / college events and other quizzing-related websites / groups. Getting better content out there to more people is one of our primary objectives. While doing this, we are not going to forget the gyaan.in charter. We also plan to make gyaan.in meetups a regular event.

To be frank, gyaan.in has faced a bit of a slump in the past few weeks because of the fact that many schools / colleges had exams going on – and most of our user base comprises of school / college students. However, this phase is now over (hope your exams went well!) and we expect activity to pick up on the forum now. We also plan to start SMS update services and a shared calendar that people can add events to for keeping track of events. Stay tuned to gyaan.in for more details.

Some of you – visitors of gyaan.in and the moderator team – might be / are apprehensive about the future of gyaan.in once I leave to join university. I want to assure you that I remain committed to the gyaan.in project. This is something I’m really passionate about, and I’m going to provide whatever support I can. Hope to see a bright future for gyaan.in!

South Park You know, I learned something today moment of the day: I found out that ‘spaghetti monster’ is a character on Sesame Street. Not just His Holy Noodliness. Maybe the former was the inspiration for the latter.

PS – Happy International Talk Like A Pirate Day!