Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Virtual Scavenger Hunt Fall 2008



Today is the day for the virtual scavenger hunt in my class. Recurring since 2005, it involves a variety of search techniques and refinements that teams of three must employ in order to beat out the competition in a two hour contest. These cannot simply be items that a search engine will pick up, though that is usually a good first step in tracking down the information. To provide the examples I have given in the past.

It might be a shopping cart full of three very different and hard to find items, or the total box office receipts of a movie with Peter Sellers in it with the only information provided being three supporting characters or an email response from your local government official. It might be.


For those in my Living and Working in a Virtual World class who read this blog, you have just been given a head start. Here are two items that do not appear on the list given out in class, but are worth one point each in the total items found scores.

List the five founding blog members of FeedTacoma and their URL addresses.

The number of days that have past since a GritCity or OpenHouse blog post has been made. (this is my new pet peeve so let's see some changes)

The above picture is from the classic "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963)" which was about a scavenger hunt, and will help with one of the items on the list.

If you care to hunt yourself, I will post the list around class time.

9 comments:

Shortey said...

This is fun!

Droid116 said...

I have always enjoyed this class assignment.

WritersHairClip said...

For an internet Junkie like me..I thought it could have been tougher. It was still fun though for sure!

Jen said...

Go easy on Grit City. My understanding is they don't get paid to write it, and since there have been a lot of cutbacks around there lately I'm sure they have a lot on their plate.

But yeah, if the Trib wants to invest in their website it might be a good idea to get some more interesting blogs or provide motivation for the ones already there to improve.

Instead of "here's your blog if you feel like writing for it" - "here's your blog, we'd like you to attract x demographic and will pay for online social networking time and increased traffic."

It would be a good thing if the Trib could attract some commenters not of the retired/neocon demographic. This would be my suggestion for making that happen.

Anyway....I know the answers but I'm not telling. Let us know how the hunt goes.

Phillipians 2:5 said...

Scavenger Hunt.. before this class i never knew that it was possible to do it online... Something to keep in mind for future reference.. Because its pretty interesting to be competing against ur class mates for who can search faster.. LOL :)

Droid116 said...

I like your ideas Jen. As for posting, I don't fault the bloggers. I think at the least the Trib should do is put expiration dates on the blog posts that would preclude them from showing up on the home page after a week. The blogs account for a significant amount of traffic on their site, and their site accounts for a growing percentage of ad revenue (though not as significant yet). It should be attended to.

Jen said...

Did they hire their new website person yet? I know they had a job opening up a while back to replace Mark. I hope he/she hits the ground running.

WritersHairClip said...

Hey Mr.Fry.
So I just want to say the Midterm was a good tough test. I survived it though....luckily lol.

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