We know how you like your information

I remember the sinking feeling I used to get in college when my professor would suddenly say, "OK, everyone, books shut. It's time for a quiz." If I'd read the material, I was usually fine. But if I'd decided to, say, go out for pizza the night before instead, different story.

Kristi Reimer

On the other hand, I'll play Trivial Pursuit until someone pries those plastic pie wedges out of my clenched fingers. It doesn't matter if I win or lose; it's the challenge of testing my knowledge that holds the thrill. It's a whole different ball game from those pop quizzes in college.

Apparently I'm not alone. For the past few months, we've been offering various quizzes on dvm360.com: ClinQuiz, a fairly straightforward quiz on a clinical topic; ImageQuiz, which asks you to identify a medical condition based on a picture; and BizQuiz, which tests your knowledge of practice management issues. (See the related links at the bottom of the page.)

These quizzes have proved to be more popular than any of us editors and Web content developers had anticipated. When we post a quiz and let you know about it through an e-newsletter (you do get our e-newsletters, right? If not, visit dvm360.com/em to sign up), we sit back and watch the Web site start to crackle. Unlike our print content, which we can't quantify in terms of readership, we can actually count the number of people who click on our site, see what they're clicking on, and calculate the amount of time they spend once they've clicked. It's been fascinating to watch what gets clicked and what garners the digital equivalent of chirping crickets.

And you love these quizzes! This makes us happy, because, at the risk of sounding like a PBS children's show, we like to make learning fun. But even though we knew the ClinQuiz, ImageQuiz, and BizQuiz were popular, nothing prepared us for the response to a humble little quiz we created called "What dog breed would you be?" Unlike our test-your-knowledge quizzes, this exercise asks you a series of questions and then pronounces what type of dog you are: there's a work edition and a personal-life version. (I'm a Yorkie—determined, dynamic, a little high-maintenance—in both contexts. Again, see the related links to test yourself.)

When we launched this quiz, our site stopped crackling and started to roar. The response to this quiz far more than doubled anything we'd posted to date. You know what that means, don't you? It means we're going to make more. Because if we can entertain you by informing you that you're a beagle at work, maybe while you're on the site you'll happen upon other articles. Perhaps one will help you sort through a management challenge you've been wrestling with this week—which you'll then proceed to solve in your typical beagle style. What more could you ask from a Web site than that?