The 31-days-to-a-better-blog challenge is carrying on at a high pace.
Today's challenge from ProBlogger Darren Rowse is all about advertising, and as this blog is about sharing rather than making money, that does give me a bit of time to catch up. However, the challenge has got more serious! Sue and Frances are offering chocolate to both the best improved blog over 31 days, and to the best comment posted by a reader of one of the blogs participating in the challenge.
I've joined the challenge, so that, dear reader, means that if you post a great, insightful and fantastic comment on this blog, I might just nominate you to be in the running to win… (Hmm, is this blog bribery?)
Sharing learning
I've been learning an awful lot over today from visiting many of the other bloggers taking part in the 31-day-challenge. There's an awful lot going on at the blogs of Alex Miller – Brent MacKinnon – Cammy Bean – Christine Martell – Frances McLean – Kate Foy – Kate Quinn – Laura Whitehead – Nancy Riffer – SmokeFree Wisconsin – Sue Waters and The Indian Blogger
Hopefully you will already identify I'm picking up on lessons from Michele Martin about making use of visuals – and I'm going to try and explore some nifty visualisation tools later this week as well.
The tasks
Day 7: Plan your Next Week's Posting Schedule
As with many of the other bloggers taking part in the 31-day-challenge, I see blogging as driven by content, not content driven by blogging. However, I do often leave unfinished posts languishing for far too long in BlogDesk before they make it onto the site, usually aided by delayed train journeys that give me the time to get them sorted out.
One I've been particularly struggling with is a 1/2 finished post on visualisations. Particularly on ways of taking RSS feeds and managing the information in more visual ways (perhaps in mind-mapped ways like the bubble-blog idea suggested by Micheles 'test-reader' on Day 2). So – I'm resolving now to take a good look at that again tomorrow and see if I can get it online.
I've also got some writings on Youth Development and the recent 10 Year Youth Strategy in the pipeline, so I'm targetting next week to get those out. Whether or not those posts really make it does, alas, depend on whether or not the train gets delayed when I head to visit my wife fascilitating at peace school later this week
Day 8: Comment on a blog you've never commented on before
The challenge has been great for encouraging me to be more willing to comment, so I've been dropping in input, questions and comments where I can across todays blog reading. Making the time to engage in conversations online does seem to move towards greater abundancy thinking and I'm really enjoying the opportunities it is presenting. I'm a little worried that my current level of participation is only enabled by the flexibility of the projects I'm working on at the moment… and that it will be trickier to keep engaged when work pressure bite.
That tells me though that I need to think about the value there is in engaging in online conversations across the blogosphere… and if there is real value there (as I'm feeling there most certainly is), I need to explore how I can restructure my work plans to make the most of it.
A question
This 31 day challenge is intensive. And the recent knowledge jam on collaborative technology I took part in was also an intensive 48 hour online interaction.
I'm interested in whether the 31-day-challenge approach could be adopted for organisational learning and change programmes (I'm going to be supporting a number of organisations on learning journeys to engage with social media this autumn) – but I'm worried that this current challenge eats up too much time to fit easily into the work day of busy teams.
Is the intensity of the challenge a key to it working? Or could you turn the 31-day-challenge into a 3-month challenge and still have the same effect?
I get the feeling the intensity is an important part of this challenge working so well to bring people together – but I'd be really interested to hear what others think….