NaBloPoMo Moderation Regurgitation
Earlier today, Norman Huelsman wrote a post asking about NaBloPoMo. I answered, but he still hasn’t approved my comment. I don’t understand why Mr. Dirby would moderate comments, but then I also don’t understand why he drives a truck and dates women. I’m cross-posting my comment on my blog, since you can’t see it on his:
I posted every day for the first week of NaBloPoMo, because I wanted to have a few posts up before I told anyone about my blog. It was harder than I thought because I refused to “cheat”, and forced myself to write posts that I was proud of.
Normally I would only post when I have a specific topic to cover (I keep a list for my personal blog and Shopping Bloomfield), but participating in NaBloPoMo required me to leave that comfort zone.
Towards the end of the week, I started posting later and later — I published one minute before midnight on Thursday, and Friday’s post didn’t go up until Saturday morning. I gave up on Saturday because blogging was taking too much time every day, but on Sunday I realized that posting to The G Spod counts. I posted to Shopping Bloomfield on Monday and Tuesday, so I’ve only missed one day of NaBloPoMo. I’ll probably write a personal post today.
I think that most bloggers should post more often, so NaBloPoMo is a fun source of extrinsic motivation. However, some bloggers may write subpar posts just to keep up, and that can weaken a blog. I wouldn’t do NaBloPoMo just to do it.
**UPDATE**
Approved.
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November 14th, 2008 at 5:02 PM
I’ve been tempted to try NaBloPoMo, but I know I’d be one of those people who’d make it through half of the first week and then crap out. It’d be cool if there were some story starter kind of things associated, like daily themes. It’d probably help people keep up (if the themes were interesting), and it’d be cool to see what other people did with the same starter.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:23 PM
Obviously my terminator blocker flagged your comment since it is somehow connected to skynet.
With multiple blogs as yourself it has been easy to keep up with NaBloPoMo. I would answer my question thinking that I’m publishing more often about stuff I probably twittering about. So it seems redundant. If I wasn’t already publishing once a day I didn’t really have anything to say, so I didn’t say anything at all. On Casualmagic.wordpress.com it is easy for me to write everyday because there is constant news and the world of magic is always changing. Also I think about magic enough that coming up with a topic is easy. I rarely don’t have anything to say there.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:25 PM
Through the year, NaBloPoMo suggests a theme for the month. I suspect everyone likes some of the themes are dislikes others; no one seems bound by them.
In the past, I’ve found it helpful to make up my own themes. For example, last December I did a 25 day countdown of holiday songs I liked. I found it useful to know ahead of time what I’d be posting about each day, although I still had some days when I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about a particular song.
But what’s harder than writing a post about a theme is making up themes. I would hate to try to make up 30 themes for all the days of November.
November 14th, 2008 at 5:42 PM
NaBloPoMo can be a really wonderful nudge for people to leave their comfort zone, but damn, some of us just aren’t interesting. I know for a fact I’d end up posting “quack, quack, quack” before long… and that would probably be among the top shelf material.
November 14th, 2008 at 9:59 PM
I personally like the challenge of coming up with something to post every single day which is why I’ve done it for nearly three years so far. I used to rely on memes/themes to help with it, but now force myself to think about what about the current day made it stand out from other days. There is always something, if you really think about it. It may not always make for the most interesting of posts, but it does help to build an excellent sort of “memory book.”
Some of the memes/themes I have seen or done are: photostories (pick any photo and tell a story about the person or thing in it), random facts about yourself, Love Thursday (talk about something that makes you think of love), picking a song for every year of your life, writing about “firsts” such as first car or first date, Haiku, and I’m sure I could come up with about 500 more if it weren’t late on a Friday night.