Poll and Survey Services: A Review (With Samples)

Create Polls and Surveys, for Blogs, Web Sites, Social Media, or Marketing Campaigns

This is the end of our series on Internet Quiz Services.  Folks love to take quizzes, and they can be great traffic-drivers. But many quiz hosting services do nothing but mine data, and their sketchy terms tell you little about how they will use the data they are mining. 

This series began by discussing the negatives of many quiz sites.  Then it went on to identify two quiz hosts who do not mine data: QuizRevolution and Polldaddy.  Earlier posts reviewed quiz creating and hosting services at these sites. Today, we end the series by looking at Polls and Surveys. Both Polldaddy and QuizRevolution offer poll and survey hosting, as well as tests.

Quizzes vs Tests vs Polls vs Surveys

At QuizRevolution, you can create surveys and quizzes. At Polldaddy, you can create quizzes, tests, surveys, and polls.  What are the differences between these?  Well, for all intents and purposes, a quiz and a test are the same thing.  Both offer a series of questions with right or wrong answers. Both are scored upon completion. A test or quiz usually assesses knowledge of a particular subject area.  On the Internet, however, quizzes tend to refer to silly, fun lists of questions, and they may or may not actually reflect knowledge or mastery.  Internet quizzes are more often centered around personality traits.  They may not be based on any sound theory at all.  On the Internet, tests tend to be more serious and more learning-focused.

A poll is a single question that asks one's opinion on something. It's generally multiple choice.  A survey, by contrast,  allows you to ask multiple questions across a wider range of question types.  It may include "scaled" questions, open-ended questions, and/or multiple choice. It may also collect demographic and/or personal information, such as name, sex, address, etc.  But there are no right or wrong answers, and no passing scores with a survey or poll.

A Review of Quibblo, a Quiz Creating Tool, and A Quiz: How Facebook Savvy Are You?

This is the second in a series of articles discussing the privacy implications of Internet Quizzes.  The first, The Dangers of Internet Quizzes, is available at https://techlaurels.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-dangers-of-internet-quizzes.html

Quibblo: A Review

WWW.Quibblo.com

NOTE: Our quiz  (see the bottom of this page) is hosted over on Quibblo.  Quibblo is supposed to be a free source for creating quizzes that can easily be shared on Social Media.  If you are following the "journey" of this blog, I originally headed over to Quibblo to investigate its use as a resource.  Supposedly, you can embed the finished quizzes on your blogs or Social Media Pages, and several sources touted it as a good resource for bloggers. My research does not necessarily concur.

Quibblo is supposed to generate content that is easy to share and easy to embed, either on your own web site or on one of the major blogging platforms.  And quizzes can be good traffic generators for Social Media. Before you start, Quibblo promises your creation efforts will be rewarded with a widget in the sidebar to help you share, embed, or promote your content. But alas, the promised code-generating widget is absent in all three browsers!  I have contacted Quibblo to see how to get the embed code.  I will update this post when I hear back.  In the meanwhile,  the quiz is linked from the bottom of this post.  That, of course is NOT the ideal situation. Generated content should be as easy to embed as the giveaway widget featured on our giveaway post.  It is not.

This post was going to be a fun quiz about Facebook Savviness.  But it evolved as I was developing the quiz and writing the post.  The quiz is no longer the highlight of this article.  Rather, the post transformed into a warning about these quiz generators, and a review of Quibblo specifically.  I am kind of sorry my research lead me to consider Quibblo as a good option.