Welcome to The Burgg

If Internet movie quizzes were towns, most of them would be Dullsville. There's a new Burgg, though, that's looking to change that landscape.

Combining Pictionary with social networking and a clean design, TheBurgg.com is a new Web site where you draw pictures of your favorite movie scenes and other people have to guess which films they're from. By limiting it to movies and incorporating some basic features of your standard Web 2.0 socializing site, The Burgg has given all its participants an open-ended topic to discuss.

At its heart lies a robust, free Java-based drawing app called Shi-Painter. Best used on PCs, according to the programmer, Shi-Painter gives the artist the tools, colors and layers to create backgrounds that would look great on that job application to LucasFilm.

Orrrrrr not. So I kid about LucasFilm, but with a bit of creativity and some familiarity with more well-known drawing programs, you can make some pretty cool pieces of art.

The best thing about The Burgg, though, is that your innate sketching talents are largely irrelevant since some of the hardest entries to guess correctly are nothing more than stick figures--just like good ol' paper-based Pictionary. Clicking on a thumbnail takes you to a larger version of the image with a text entry box below for entering your guess. Entering in even one word gives you a list of likely movies to choose from, so guessing is as easy as shouting out the answer.

There are still some glitches that need to be worked out. Typing in "Indiana Jones," for example, will give you the titles of the second, third and unreleased fourth movie, but not the cinematic action classic that launched the franchise. There's nothing really stopping anybody from mislabeling their drawing and uploading it, either. Which reminds me about another neat part of The Burgg: if you don't want to use their drawing program, you can always upload your own. Additional functions include the ability to e-mail a drawing or to embed it in your blog.

Simpler and more powerful than iSketch, but more community-oriented than Skrbl, The Burgg seems to be the only drawing-based movie quiz site with all the answers.