Tool for journalists: Riddle, for interactive polls and lists

What is it? Tool for adding quizzes, polls and BuzzFeed-style lists to any story.

How is it of use to journalists? Everyone loves a quiz, as news outlets from BuzzFeed to UsVsTh3m to the Guardian will testify.

Quizzes and polls are so popular because, as BuzzFeed's vice president of agency strategy Jason Perelman has said, they "validate' people's assumptions of themselves.

For journalists looking to incorporate quizzes into their own stories, without the help of a developer, Riddle offers an easy solution.

The free platform, which came out of beta this week, allows users to create BuzzFeed-style lists, polls and quizzes in just a few clicks.

There's also the option to produce what Riddle's co-founder Mike Hawkins calls "commenticles".

Shorter than a blog post but longer than a tweet, 'commenticles' enable contexutal comments or opinions to be posted alongside an article, and might just prove to be the ideal middle-ground for some users, despite the name.

Speaking to Journalism.co.uk at the Collision tech conference in Las Vegas last week, Hawkins said: "What we are focusing on is to make interactive widgets incredibly fast to create... something you can make in about a minute".


Screenshot from Riddle.com

Riddle's quick and easy interface is based around dropdown menus. Large pictures make posts more engaging, with options to add images from Facebook, upload them from your desktop or search elsewhere around the web.

As always, make sure you have the correct permissions to use whatever image you decide to go for.

When you're done, your Riddle can be shared direct to social media or embedded into your site, such as the commentical below.


Update

Disclosure: Between submitting the copy for this article and its publication, the author was announced as the randomly selected winner of a competition held by Riddle, having been automatically entered into the competition when creating a quiz for this article.

These events are purely coincidental and the author only discovered the competition was taking place when testing the product for the purposes of this article. Journalism.co.uk was made aware of this development after publication.

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