The 30 Day Blog Fitness Challenge

Inspired by my coworkers, I’m going to participate in the 30 Day Blog Fitness Challenge.  In contemplating it, though, I want to add a little bit of extra interest for myself, and remind myself of the value of taxonomy and categorization.  I used to post about all sorts of things, and I find that I stick to work-related things mostly.  Why? I don’t know.  I mean, there are categories. I can use them.  People can find what they need!  But recently I’ve become super lazy and avoided any sort of tagging, just tossing things willy nilly onto the blog, and focusing mostly on work related topics.  Add to this the fact that I’ve just joined Google+ and I find myself categorizing my people into circles which I’m not exactly confident about.  Are they the right circles?  Do I need more (or less)?  Am I ever going to send messages to that group?

So not only am I going to post every day for 30 days (or more), I’m going to put meaningful categories on the blog posts.  And then I’m going to post to (and list) the Google+ Circles I’m sharing that post with.  This should actually help me get better at creating and maintaining meaningful circles for the things I want to talk about.  Fitness, entertainment, work, open source, philosophy… there is space for all of this and more in my thoughts and in my blog, but if I am talking to a specific set of people I’ve identified in Google+ as interested in the topic it may help focus the message and make it more compelling and engaging.  Otherwise I seem to soften it a bit for the general masses.

So prepare for 30 days of posts about… whatever.  Adventure racing.  Google Plus itself.  The Semantic Web.  Food.  I’ll tell you what the names of the circles I’m sharing them with are.  And they’ll be internally categorized reasonably on the blog.

Anyone else want to join me on this?  I think this will be an excellent test of those circles we’ve been making.  Are there topics that are appropriate for one or two of your circles? If not, maybe you need to adjust them?  What is the purpose of circles unless they help you target specific conversations to the right people?

This post be sent as public on G+.  It’s not a copout.  Seriously 🙂