back2blog – Climb to the Stars

Third Back to Blogging Challenge [en]

[fr] 10 jours, 10 articles, histoire de relancer la machine à bloguer. Qui se lance avec moi?

Starting Monday, I’m going to blog daily ten days in a row to kick the blogging machine into gear again. Who else is in?

Seems I need a periodical reboot. As you can see I’ve written a few blog posts recently after a terrible dry spell. What happened?

After the success of the second Back to Blogging Challenge, I kicked off the Blogging Tribe Experiment, went sailing in Spain (which put a serious dent in my blogging habit), came back to a lot of work and orphan kittens, which ended up spending 5 weeks with me and only left for their final homes last Thursday. (Yes, I have hundreds of kitten photos and videos to process, now.)

So, I feel like I’ve “failed” the Blogging Tribe Experiment, personally, because I didn’t blog anywhere close to what I intended — or as regularly as I would have expected from the tribe members. So, while we figure out where and how to take this experiment forward, I need a little structure in rekindling my blogging habit. It really is a habit.

Edit 24.06.2013: thanks to Luca, I’ve discovered Twitter widgets. Check out the latest posts from the challengers here!

Tweets about “#back2blog”
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Blogging Tribe: A Social and Blogging Experiment Looking for Volunteers [en]

[fr] Recherche de volontaires motivés pour une expérience socio-blogueuse.

Here’s the idea: form a group of bloggers, who agree to blog regularly for a certain amount of time, and read each other.

Scale? A dozen bloggers or so. From a dozen posts a month to one a day on average. For three months (or six? or six weeks?).

Why?

One of the things I understood while reading Here Comes Everybody, and which was missing from my global thinking about the connected world we live in, is the question of scale. That with more, comes different. Small group dynamics are not the same as large group dynamics. Small networks do not behave the same as big ones. At one point power laws kick in, and large groups or networks become fundamentally “unbalanced”.

Clay talks about the early blogging communities in his book, and I’ve understood what we feel we have “lost”, we bloggers of old: we’ve lost the small group dynamics, where we all read each other and there was a ball in the air that we all kept in movement.

I’ve seen that feeling reappear during the two “Back to Blogging” challenges I threw at fellow bloggers. For the ten days the challenge lasted, we started reading each other again, responding to each other in comments and even in blog posts.

So, I’d like to do this on a slightly larger scale. Larger not by the number of people, but larger as far as the dynamics are concerned. “Back to Blogging” has made a little foam appear in the egg whites we were beating — I want to try and turn the jug that holds them upside down.

Unlike Back to Blogging where I set the rules and dived in with what amounts to “qui m’aime me suive”, I’d like us to hash out the precise details together.

If you’re interested in this experiment and contemplating taking part, please get in touch with me. I’ll set up a quick mailing-list or Facebook book so we can all discuss the specifics and get the ball rolling.

Samedi soir fatigué [fr]

[en] Tired Saturday evening post.

Après quatre jours de SAWI (module 4), je suis raide, mais contente. C’est surtout aux étudiants qu’il faut le demander, mais je crois que ce module s’est vraiment bien passé.

Je voulais aller au cinéma hier soir mais je n’ai pas eu le courage de m’extraire de chez moi. Aujourd’hui, par contre, je m’y tiens. J’ai besoin d’aérer mon cerveau avant que la semaine prochaine démarre (une demi-journée de consulting, une conférence, une demi-journée d’enseignement: je vais encore bosser samedi).

J’ai sorti les chats et fait une vidéo de Tounsi, qui est fort câlin ces temps. Période des chaleurs? Possible. Quintus et lui sont de plus en plus “copains”, si on peut dire. Sommeil “en contact” (ils aiment visiblement les deux assez un coin particulier sur le canapé pour tolérer la proximité de l’autre afin d’y être), un peu de judo, courses-poursuites dehors… Contente aussi.

En passant, j’ai remarqué la forte viralité des photos de Tounsi sur Facebook. Quintus est moins populaire, peut-être parce qu’il est moins comique que Tounsi, juste très très cute.

Pour la deuxième fois, je suis allée chercher jeudi mon panier de légumes du jardin potager. J’adore. C’est juste en face de chez moi. Je vous en dirai plus long dans un autre article.

Encore contente: #back2blog fonctionne bien cette fois aussi, et mon groupe Going Solo pour indépendants également. Tout baigne. J’ai juste un peu trop de pain sur la planche d’ici fin avril.

2ème Back to Blogging Challenge, jour 6. Bloguent aussi: Nathalie Hamidi(@nathaliehamidi), Evren Kiefer (@evrenk), Claude Vedovini (@cvedovini), Luca Palli (@lpalli), Fleur Marty (@flaoua), Xavier Borderie (@xibe), Rémy Bigot (@remybigot),Jean-François Genoud (@jfgpro), Sally O’Brien (@swissingaround), Marie-Aude Koiransky (@mezgarne), Anne Pastori Zumbach (@anna_zap), Martin Röll (@martinroell), Gabriela Avram (@gabig58), Manuel Schmalstieg (@16kbit), Jan Van Mol (@janvanmol), Gaëtan Fragnière (@gaetanfragniere), Jean-François Jobin (@gieff). Hashtag:#back2blog.

Back to Blogging Challenge Wrap-Up [fr]

[en] Retour sur le challenge "back to blogging".

So, a good ten days after the end of the Back to Blogging challenge, how are things going?

Well, first of all, I’ve been putting off writing this article because I’m setting myself constraints which make it a big pile of work. For example, the last two days of the challenge I was too busy to link to the articles by other participants (arguably the longest part of publishing those posts). So I’m thinking “ah, I need to do the wrap-up, but before that I should complete those articles”. Well, nope. Obviously it’s not going to happen. Maybe somebody else feels like putting a list together for those two days?

I’ve also been thinking “ah, I should make a list here of all the bloggers who successfully did the 10 days”. Participating is great, and I’m sure many of those who did not complete the challenge got something out of it, but hey, sticking to it is even greater!

So, congratulations to all those of you who stuck through the whole ten days. I’d love to hear feedback on what participating did for you!

For me, even though I feel myself sliding back into “long blog post” mode (this is an attempt to break that) I kind of got into the habit of “a post a day”, which means that when I skip a day, I notice it, and blog the next day. So I’ve been publishing pretty much every couple of days I’d say, which is pretty good.

The other thing I got out of the challenge is a sense of community amongst bloggers — something I hadn’t felt for years and really miss from the early days of blogging. I was really amazed at the sheer number (about 20!) of people who took on the challenge!

At the root of this sense of community, in my opinion, is reading what other people write. A blogger is not an island. In my last post musing about what makes a blog a blog, one of the criteria that comes up is that a blog is in the network. It links to others, is linked to, commented upon, the blogger has contacts with other bloggers or readers. A blog cannot thrive in a vacuum.

Let’s try and keep that alive, shall we? Or we’ll be overrun by the fashion bloggers 😉

Bloggy Friday, #back2blog, et l'eclau [fr]

[en] Motivating these days: Bloggy Friday, still going strong after all these years; #back2blog challenge, picked up by 20 or so bloggers; and eclau, the coworking space I manage in Lausanne, which turns 4 today.

Je fais partie de ces personnes qui vit sa vie en ayant le sentiment de ne jamais avoir assez de temps. Oh, je suis lucide. J’ai autant de temps que tout le monde, je sais que c’est plutôt que j’ai du mal à prioriser, hiérarchiser, décider, me frustrer.

Like a crazy hoarder I mistake the root cause of my growing mountain of incomplete work. The hoarder thinks he has a storage problem (when he really has a ‘throwing things away problem’). I say I am ‘time poor’ as if the problem is that poor me is given only 24 hours in a day. It’s more accurate to say… what exactly? It seems crazy for a crazy person to use his own crazy reasoning to diagnose his own crazy condition. Maybe I too easily add new projects to my list, or I am too reluctant to exit from unsuccessful projects. Perhaps I am too reluctant to let a task go, to ship what I’ve done. They’re never perfect, never good enough.

On Task Hoarding and ToDo Bankruptcy (Leon Bambrik)

Donc, je fais plein de trucs, et pas juste des trucs qui rapportent de l’argent, et ces temps, j’avoue être particulièrement motivée par ces “activités non lucratives”.

Le Bloggy Friday continue son bonhomme de chemin après toutes ces années — on était une douzaine hier soir. J’ai pris conscience il y a quelques mois que malgré l’échelle assez modeste de cette rencontre (entre 5 et 10 personnes par souper, une fois par mois), elle avait permis à de belles amitiés et des relations d’affaires de naître, au fil des années. C’est ce genre de chose qui me motive à continuer.

Sur un coup de tête, j’ai lancé le “Back to Blogging Challenge” (#back2blog) qu’une vingtaine de personnes (dépassant toutes mes espérances!) est en train de relever. Il y a une super énergie, on lit les articles des autres, on commente… cette excitation palpable me rappelle mes premières années de blogueuse. Ça me fait particulièrement plaisir de voir qu’il y tant des blogueurs chevronnés que débutants qui y prennent part (y compris une poignée d’étudiants de la formation SAWI sur les médias sociaux!) et qu’on y blogue en au moins cinq langues!

Finalement l’eclau (Espace Coworking LAUsanne), qui fête ses 4 ans aujourd’hui et se porte extrêmement bien: grande variété de professions représentées, personnes lumineuses et passionnées, excellente entente et riches échanges entre les coworkers, bon équilibre entre “possibilité de travailler” et “possibilité de socialiser”, et un lunch mensuel qui commence à prendre son rythme de croisière et trouver sa place dans nos vies.

Merci à vous tous sans qui ces petites activités communautaires n’existeraient pas!

#back2blog challenge (5/10):