Notes on a Blogging Accelerator

Blogging has changed my life. Writing online, not even consistently but gradually, in various forms on various platforms over a long period of time has changed my life. Opening doors and opportunities - leading to friendships, jobs, clients and more. It’s hard to overstate the impact it’s had.

And yet of the people I know “in real life” very few are bloggers.

Over the years I’ve tried various ways to encourage people to blog. I tried a thing called NYCBlogClub with a group of friends - the idea was to blog once a week for 10 weeks (there were 10 of us so this would have been 100 blog posts between us). I think we managed a handful of posts before the whole thing petered out.

Then I tried a private slack group where we’d meet once a week and try and move a few people intentionally from “not blogging” to “blogging”. None of that stuck either.

It’s all still a bit of a mystery how to get people writing online. Some of the resistance I hear:

• Technical barriers and setup problems
• Not knowing what to write about
• Insecurity about publishing for “everyone” to see
• Not wanting your identity be as a “blogger” (which some see as a negative thing)
• Not keeping going after writing online and nothing happening

There are a few programs out there that will get you writing online. Write of passage is very expensive, and yet does seem to work, at least for some people. Packy McCormick went through Write of Passage and then launched Not Boring. And Seth Godin’s altMBA program is actually largely about doing projects and then writing about them online.

Perhaps the most successful thing I’ve done to help get people blogging is by changing people’s mental model of blogging from one of prestige and polish to one of punk and plants. My two most well-read blog posts:

• Small b blogging about writing for small audiences and keeping it weird
• Of Digital Streams, Campfires and Gardens about digital gardening and writing as a means of inquiry

But the question remains and still bugs me. How do you get people to start and sustain an online writing practice?

Here’s some notes I had while biking:

A Blogging Accelerator

The idea is to make a blogging accelerator. Only you don’t call it anything to do with blogging. Instead you just make it an interesting project that people engage in, with a by-product being writing up the project online.

The thesis is this: don’t tell people they should be blogging or explain to them why to blog but instead trick them into writing online and show them how the magic works. Get them to feel it for themselves.

So.

There’s two concepts, they’re both very similar:

1) Pixel Poets

It’s a 5 week course to engage more closely with poetry and more closely with the web.

• Week 1: Poetry & The Web - We look at why poetry is cool and why the web is cool. We explore things like Poetry APIs, people like Allison Parrish and digital poetry experiences like the NYT’s Close Read series.
• Week 2: Choose a poem - Pick a poem and read it closely. Perhaps we’d do things like typesetting the poem in HTML (using a platform like Glitch) or copy and pasting the poem into a Google Doc and annotating it with a small group. Mostly this is about a) getting comfortable doing little scrappy web things and b) looking closely at poetry
• Week 3: Choose a theme - Now you’ve got your poem and you’ve spent some time with, choose a specific idea, theme or aspect of the poem to highlight. It could be the backstory of the poet, or a specific word/stanza. But you want to start to explore possible projects and experiments that you could do to focus on that theme.
• Week 4: Make your experiment - Now you have your poem, your theme and your possible experiments you pick a particular direction and build a web experience around your poem and theme. It could be as simple as designing a layout and web-page dedicated to your poem. Or it could be an interactive experience. Or whatever - I expect the output of this will be a constant source of delight and surprise.
• Week 5: Finish your project and write it up - Actually building your experience and polishing it will take longer than a week so let’s factor in another week for polish and refinement. AND - you have to write up a “making of” essay. This is a kind of personal motivation, technical how-to about how the project came together and why this poem means something to you. You have to email that essay to 5 people.

The idea is that you’d run this a cohort so people can have group discussion, make friends, bounce ideas off each other and maybe even collaborate on projects. I think this sounds like fun! But/and the kicker is that you have to write one essay a week about your experience in the group.

People aspire to be “poetry people” and instead we teach them to be bloggers by doing something interesting and writing about it. Sneaky.

2) Digital Walkers

It’s a 5 week course to engage more closely with walking & nature, and more closely with the web.

• Week 1: Walking & The Web - We look at why walking is cool, and why the web is cool. We’d explore things like Jane’s Walk and people like Craig Mod and Christopher Goddard.
• Week 2: Choose a walk - Here we pick a particular walk. Doesn’t have to be a “big” walk - in fact it might be better if it’s not. Something ordinary, mundane or urban could be totally fine. Pick a walk or area that you’re interested in. You should make a little web-hosted repository for your research to get comfortable putting things on the web, even if it’s a simple list of links.
• Week 3: Choose a theme & choose experiments - Now that you’ve got your walk we’ll look at exploring some themes. Making maps, researching the history of the area and looking at the geography of the walk in more detail. What does this walk mean to you? We’ll create a list of ways to experience the walk using the internet.
• Week 4: Pick an experiment and do the walk! - Narrow down your ideas to the one you’re going to do. Then you do the walk! You’ll likely be recording some kind of media during the walk so you need to have at least some idea of what you’re going to make before you start - but of course I imagine that after doing the walk you’re more inspired and creatively energized than before you did the walk.
• Week 5: Make the project and write it up - Here we build the web experience / companion / piece. Is it simply a collection of photos of the walk? A fully interactive walk experience? Binaural audio from the walk? Who knows. Could be simple, could be fancy. Once you’ve made your cool web experience you have to ALSO write a personal essay with a behind the scenes “how to” of choosing the walk and making the web experience.

The idea is that you’d run this a cohort so people can have group discussion, make friends, bounce ideas off each other and maybe even collaborate on projects. I think this sounds like fun! But/and the kicker is that you have to write one essay a week about your experience in the group.

People aspire to be go on more walks and spend more time in nature and instead we teach them to be bloggers by doing something interesting and writing about it. Sneaky.

Would this be a more effective vehicle for getting people to start blogging? I don’t know but.. maybe? Seems like fun either way.

If I get enough time I’d love to get these projects off the ground. I’m blogging them here as a way to perhaps create some interest and kickstart some serendipity. Maybe I was too obvious about the sneaky trojan horse blogging thing?

In the meantime, I’ve been collecting some links related to pixel poets and digital walkers over on Are.na. If you have cool resources, essays and links for either interest send them to me, I wanna explore these spaces more!