Bzz! Are you Smarterer?

Have you heard of Smarterer? It’s a website full of tests on the most popular digital, social, and technical skills of the day. Think you know Microsoft Word? Or Tumblr? How about Facebook? Smarterer uses the crowd-source method of developing questions, meaning you can submit questions for others to answer. As you answer questions, you can improve your rank overall as well as earn badges.

BzzAgent asked me a while back to have a go with the website and weigh in... We were asked to play the BzzAgent Smarterer Quiz, which drills you on every possible bit of info related to BzzAgent. Some questions were fairly obvious, such as "What level comes after Busy Bee?" while others were incredibly hard such as, "Where did the BzzAgent company outing recently take place?" (How should I know that?!).

I suppose my biggest question about this site is, “What’s the point?”

Crowd-sourced tests are popular around the web- you can answer thousands of questions on GoodReads about books and see where you rank on your book knowledge, or even take silly tests around the net to determine which Disney princess you would be or which Hollywood hottie you’d be best matched with. The thing is, whereas comparing my book knowledge against others seems appealing (Goodreads), I can’t say I care too much about how well I know Twitter in comparison to my peers. Maybe it’s because I know I don’t know jack about it... I use social networks on a basic level, and have no desire to know more. Social networks are not the most important things in my life (gasp!).

I am also not a huge fan of crowd-sourced tests... Any Tom, Dick, or Harry can post a question and the answer they believe to be correct. Unfortunately, you end up with contributions from people who are far from being pros on the subject matter themselves. You can mark a question if you know it to be incorrect, but if someone submits a seriously obscure question like “In what year did blahblahblah establish the blahblah part of the blahblah website?” how would most people even know whether it was them or the question author who was wrong?

I suppose social networking enthusiasts and geeks would love to see how they compare. Maybe there is someone out there who truly cares about how well they know Microsoft Excel compared to their peers. For me, it was interesting to toy with, but I doubt I’ll jump onto that site when I’m bored or procrastinating.