Community Blogging Challenge

Feedback Feature requests
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A good way to discover other W.a blogs and interact with other bloggers, would be to organise a blogging challenge.

Challenges run for a limited amount of time on a specific topic or theme. The challenge is to write on that theme a certain number of times during the event. It might be one week long where you post daily, or one month long where you post twice a week. I like the way Inktober does it because you can pick any frequency you like.

When lots of people write on similar topics at the same time, it’s easier to respond to each other. When you discover someone’s writing you like, then you tend to check out their other posts.

I’ve taken part in one very large challenge with 1200+ blogs, and another with around 50. They were both interesting in different ways, but the main goal was to discover other bloggers and respond to those you were interested in.

I created a button for the larger challenge which allowed visitors to be taken to a random blog among the 1200 participants. Many people liked that idea because they could easily discover blogs without being overwhelmed by the huge list of participants. The text on the button read “Surprise Me!”, which probably helped make it more fun.

Such challenges used to display a badge or banner, and there would be a list of all participating blogs. There needs to be something that identifies and connects participants. That way it feels like an event.

How does that sound?

(commenting is a key feature of a blogging challenge. Maybe my response tag idea could help bloggers connect during the challenge.)

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Great idea @nibl! We already do frequent writing prompts. These, however, are more general and don’t require an account to write a response. But having writing challenges for people with Write.as blogs would be great! It’d create more of a sense of community and accountability.

I can also see these challenges being connected to particular hashtags that can then be searched on Read Write.as. If you want to start a community blogging challenge for Write.as then I’d be more than onboard to help you make that a reality!

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The best part of a blogging challenge for me was always “meeting“ other bloggers. There really needs to be a way to connect on the platform for that to work. Once you get to know each other you might contact by email or dm somewhere, but the initial connection is where you are taking part in the virtual event.

Therefore I would want there to be either a commenting system, or the response posts mechanism to be mature, before organising or taking part in a blogging challenge.

To put it another way, if a blogging challenge were only about creating a certain amount of content within a period of time, then I could do that on my own as a personal challenge.

When a challenge manages to connect bloggers, people begin building relationships that last for a longer period, and some do other stuff together. I definitely see it as a community building event.