Sporcling for Size

Its been 10 months since I was fortunate enough to stumble across this site from a random work email forward. You see I'm a trivia and useless facts nut. If I could have majored in Trivia in college, I would have. I'd have studied statistics from the Schwab, Geography from Carmen Sandiego, history from Alex Trebec, and English from Pat Sajack. If there is a job out there that pays to know this stuff, sign me up, I can be a trivia consultant. Anyways, on to Sporcle and what its all about.

I have to take a break from the schedule and inform everyone who is not aware of quite possibly my favorite website of the decade, aka 2010, sporcle.com.
Sporcle was created by Matt Ramme, who must be a genius. The website provides quizzes that range from trivial diversions to educational study guides. They can be very practical, from naming the U.S. States and Presidents, to very bizzarre and challenging, such as naming Thingamabobs, or random country exports. The site's mission is to provide their users brain-engaging fun everyday. Everyday indeed, I must average 4 to 5 sporcle quizzes a day.

How it works
Each quiz has a topic, lets use U.S. States, the most popular quiz with over 4.6 million plays (or about the population of Costa Rica). The quiz will give you a brief description or hint on how to play or what to enter. Each quiz is timed so as to provide an urgency to answer the questions and to promote brain usage (rather than google). The times vary on size and difficulty of the quiz. The U.S. States quiz is a beginner level and allows 10 minutes to answer. Anyone with a 6th grade education should have no problem. One of the best features of this site is the automatic answering feature. As soon as you type the correct word, name or phrase, the answer automatically fills into the appropriate blank space below. You will never have to hit enter while playing sporcle, a common mistake by first time users. If you have exhausted your brain and can't think of anymore answers, you have 2 options, you can wait until the time runs out or hit the give up option that ends the game abruptly. At this point the remaining answers are revealed to show how well or not well you did. You can hide these answers if you want to try it again at a later time, but that's silly.

Each game is user contributed. Some are published by the editors onto the main home page, others can just be searched for. At the time of this post, there are 3,873 published games and 117,793 user created games which have been played 343,096,687 times. Therefore, even though I've played hundreds of Sporcle quizzes, I still can be satisfied knowing that there a new games being created daily. So I can find out what MLB players hit 20 or more homeruns from 1980 to the present and what capitals lie on a river. Endless opportunities for knowledge.

So I want to extend a courtesy wave to Sporcle and thank them for helping me learn every capital of every country in the world, not to mention every flag. And for letting me know every division 1 basketball mascot in the United States. And correctly identifying every 1990's television intro theme song. In return, I'll pass on the good word and even incorporate sporcle into everyday usage as the term googling is often used, you can find me sporcling for more knowledge.

thanks for stopping by and happy sporcling!

bsv
the courtesy wave