In continuing my building blogging relationships series I now want to turn our attention to blog projects and memes.
As I look back over my 2.5 years of blogging to some of the most interactive periods in my blogs – I realize that many of the key relationships have developed out of working on shared projects – both those initiated by others and myself.
Back in 2003 on my personal blog I started a project called Celebrating the Underblog where I invited bloggers to submit blogs that they thought were underrated and deserved more publicity. That year we uncovered 100 blogs. In 2004 I ran the project again and we uncovered over 500 blogs. This year I moved the project to problogger.net and refocussed it upon business blogs – the response was smaller but still worthwhile.
Another project that I ran on my personal blog was Blogger Idol where I nominated a theme each week and got other bloggers to submit a post on it (here is week 1). Once again the response to this was massive as over a three month period hundreds of bloggers participated – all linking back to my blog each week – all interacting with me and one another.
I’ve run a variety of similar projects, awards, memes and experiments over the years and every time find people respond. They serve as an ideal place to meet other bloggers, to get the word out about your blog and to create a space for other bloggers to meet one another and interact.
Starting your own blog project can be powerful – but it can also be a lot of work. The other way of doing it is to get involved in other people’s projects. These are great places often to meet and interact with the wider blogging community – you never know who you might meet.
What blogging projects and memes have you started or been involved in? How have they helped or hindered your blogging?
