I used to have a problem with blogging; I’d get stuck coming up with things for me to talk about, or I’d take so long trying to craft the post that I’d miss the moment and forget the message. Now that blogging is part of my job, I don’t have to put it off every time the time the topic comes up. Additionally, by using a number of different types of blogging platforms, I’ve gotten a little less compulsive about having to write pages and pages (although perhaps not in evidence on this particular blog ;D ). Here at ETS, there is an experiment in multi-author blogging called, appropriately, Stuff.
Get involved, or just follow the RSS feed. It’s good stuff.
I’ve personally loved the Stuff blog for lots of reasons, but writing for an audience that I know and respect has a lot to do with it. When we first launched it we were honestly sharing for each other — the other authors in the space. That seemed to motivate us all. There is a good lesson in that for a course site … if students are writing in the same place, many of them see it as writing for each other. That is really interesting to me and I think it impacts the quality of the writing.
The other thing Stuff did was really drive home the one button web concepts that I am constantly touting. The idea that you can put a little bookmarklet in your toolbar and really publish just about anything with a single click is an amazing turn of events online. That little experiment pushed me to switch from worpress to typepad — the speed and ease of one button publishing is another one of those little motivating factors that pushes me to write.