NaBloPoMo Reflections

Now that I’m back in Madison, I have time to think about NaBloPoMo.  Overall, I enjoyed the challenge of finding something interesting to post every day.  I actually think I succeeded pretty well and kept most of my posts related to my primary blogging topics. Here are the rest of my blogging-relates thoughts from the course of the month:

Blog Post Style

I noticed that all of my blog posts are about the same length — somewhere around 400 words.  Interestingly, the two most popular posts over the month (via the number of comments) were “A Literary xkcd” and “A Story of Manfiction,” both posts that were less than 200 words.  Switching up my posts length is something I want to think more about.

Finding My Niche

Looking back over the books I’ve been reading, there is some consistency based on the fact that I’ve been reading lots of similar books for my journalism classes.  I love to read literary journalism, and will probably continue to do that even when class is over, but it’s sort of an odd niche in the book blogging community.

That said, NaBloPoMo got me thinking a little more about what unique voice I bring to book bloggers.  I think one way I am different is that I spend a lot of time thinking about blogging as a concept — how can blogging be better, what is the role of blogging in relation to other media, how can book bloggers make themselves (individually and perhaps collectively) better?  I read a lot of blogs about blogging, a lot of sites on social media and the overall shift in media to online technology, and some of the professional book blogs from mainstream newspapers.  However, I don’t really blog about any of those topics very much even though I feel like they are related to what Sophisticated Dorkiness is about.

Hosting My Own Challenge?

I’ve had this idea in my head for a long time, but NaBloPoMo brought it out again.  I’m going to write a bigger post with the idea more fleshed-out for tomorrow, but basically I’m thinking about a blog-improvement challenge for 2009.  Maybe like, every other week, coming up with a task or project related to improving your blog in some way (writing better content, getting readers, setting goals, stuff like that).  I’ll write more tomorrow to gauge interest, but it’s a percolating thought for the moment.

P.S. This post is now 406 words, exactly on track 🙂

P.P.S The image has nothing to do with NaBloPoMo, it just made me laugh. Photo by flickr user Gaeten Lee.