slinkset – Climb to the Stars

The Good Idea That's Not Working [en]

[fr] Proposer à mes lecteurs de voter sur les sujets qu'ils aimeraient que je traite ne semble pas fonctionner pour moi. En rendant ma liste d'idées publique, je l'ai en quelque sorte stérilisée -- je m'en suis dépossédée. Et je blogue mieux de façon un peu impulsive qu'en suivant un programme.

Two months ago I stumbled upon Scott Berkun’s blog and thought his Reader’s Choice series was a really great idea. (I’m reading his book “The Myths of Innovation” right now, by the way, and highly recommend you do so too.)

I decided to give it a try myself, and quickly created a slinkset account for CTTS which I pre-populated with my long list of blogging ideas, which had until then been sitting in a note in Evernote (I’m still in love with it, by the way). The idea was that I would pick the most popular topic twice a month and blog about it, which I have done twice so far.

So obviously, this isn’t really working for me. The fact I mismanaged my commitments for May and June (which means my calendar is bursting at the seams) clearly doesn’t help me keep the schedule, but I’ve noticed another side-effect: moving my “blogging ideas” out of evernote and into slinkset has actually killed that list for me. I think it’s made it scary. How come? I can think of a few reasons:

the list is now in big bold text
it’s not as easy to edit: each idea now feels like a commitment, rather than a quickly-jotted-down note
it’s public, so I self-censor (not much, but I do a little)
ideas are rated, so suddenly I feel that I’m blogging more for others and less for myself (blogging mainly for oneself is, in my opinion, one of the keys to a successful and long-lasting blogging career)
I’m supposed to pick the more popular idea twice a month, so I don’t feel free to explore the other less popular ones in the meantime.

So, all in all, I’m not sure making that list public was a great move for my blogging. Also, I think that pre-populating the slinkset list (an attempted “improvement — hah! — on Scott’s original idea) was the best way to kill community-generated contributions. (Plus, of course, my readership is somewhat more modest than Scott’s.)

Where do I go from now? I like the idea that readers of this blog can suggest ideas and vote on them. On the other hand, I’m aware that CTTS readers form a “following” rather than a “community”, and I think this kind of system is more suited to communities than followings.

I think I need to put my blogging ideas back in Evernote to reclaim them. I’ve always blogged best when I do it on impulse rather than schedule (I get an itch, which then becomes an urge to blog about this or that).

Do you have any thoughts on all this? I’d love to hear them.

Something Strange [en]

[fr] Petit épisode étrange: pleine d'élan pour bloguer, je mets sur slinkset mes dernières idées d'articles, et pof! mon élan se casse la figure. Je n'ai pas tout à fait identifié ce qui s'était passé. (J'ai quand même blogué, hein.)

So, something strange happened to me a bit earlier. I went to bed yesterday with a huge drive to blog, ideas for articles, wrote them down in Evernote, got up this morning ready to blog, dealt with some domestic issues, and set to work.

Blogging drive intact.

Before I actually started writing, I decided that I would add my latest article ideas to the list on slinkset that people can add to or vote on. So I copy-pasted, went through my old post list to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything and… As soon as I had finished doing that, my blogging drive went *poof!* almost down to nothing.

Well, I didn’t bow down, picked a topic or two, and blogged happily — but still, I’m intrigued. What made my blogging drive deflate? I can think of two things:

taking the list from private to public
going through the complete list (overwhelming)

I thought I’d share this little episode with you to see if you had any insight, dear readers.

What Should I Blog About? Have Your Say [en]

[fr] Une expérience: faites des suggestions et votez sur les prochains sujets que vous aimeriez que j'aborde dans ce blog! Anglais et français, bien entendu. 🙂

This is an experiment, utterly and totally ripped off from what Scott Berkun is doing on his blog with his Reader’s Choice series.

As many of you know, my problem is not finding ideas to write about. My problem is that I have too many. I have a long list of blog post ideas in Evernote which I dip in every now and again when I feel like blogging and don’t have an immediate idea (which is not that often, to be honest — not the “feel like blogging” bit, the “don’t have an idea” one).

So, here’s the deal. I’ve opened a Slinkset site called What do you want to read about next on CTTS? — I’ve started populating it with my blog post ideas. I would like to invite you to vote on the topics and add your own suggestions. You don’t even have to sign up, it’s really easy!

A couple of times a month, I’ll make sure I blog about the most popular topic. I’m looking forward to seeing how this works 🙂

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