Your thoughts on where next for Bloggers Club

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Letā€™s use 2023 to mix up what we could do with Bloggers Club.

How come? Donā€™t rock the boat, folks dig Bloggers Club.

They do, and for folks who get involved, the community is grateful. Yet letā€™s be honest, the number of people who get involved is low. For sure itā€™s not always about the numbers but I canā€™t help but feel there are more writers out there. People who need a simple way to get started with writing and sharing their thoughts.

I have some ideas and before I dive into that letā€™s zoom out a bit and talk about some of MoTā€™s intentions for 2023. Our plan for The Club is to integrate it across ministryoftesting.com. Think real-time text chat (via multiple channels), asynchronous discussions (via useful categories), voice and video chat plus more ways to connect.

All would be interconnected with the existing content and will appear on the MoT platform ā€” under the talks, articles, podcasts etc. We want to remove our reliance on 3rd party services that we have little or no control over e.g. Twitter and Slack. The ambition for ministryoftesting.com is to become ā€œThe Home of Testingā€ ā€” the first place people go to for all things testing.

Weā€™re a small team and have to focus our efforts in 2023, which means making tough choices about the initiatives or ā€œproductsā€ we support. Bloggers Club is up for review.

An alternative to Bloggers Club would be to just encourage folks to write articles for MoT. The article gets a lot of exposure and the writer is paid for their efforts. Yet itā€™s quite a leap for some who just want to share stuff ā€“ each article goes through an official editorial process. A personal blog is cool yet how does the community who land on ministryoftesting.com reap the benefits of those blog posts? They can find them on the MoT blog feed if itā€™s part of the feed. Perhaps thereā€™s an alternative.

:bulb: What if MoT provided a basic blog hosting and writing platform?

Perhaps consider it like Medium yet just for the MoT community.

Post more often and receive rewards/badges for posting effort. We build a profile page to showcase all the good stuff youā€™re doing with Ministry of Testing, including auto links to all your blog posts (hosted on MoT), discussion replies, testing event contributions etc.

These are all just ideas right now.

How about you, how would you like to see Bloggers Club evolve? What are your thoughts on ā€œgiving upā€ or sharing your writing efforts with a MoT hosted blog profile (post on a personal blog and post on a MoT version of your blog)?

I wonā€™t be setting a Bloggers Club topic for this month and beyond until weā€™ve got a better picture of where weā€™re going with Bloggers Club.

I hope this makes sense.

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I still think there should be a place to share our thoughts and share the blog posts that we have. It still helps. Maybe in its place, maybe use the platform for a bloggerā€™s meetup, and maybe share our blog post.

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The current bloggers feed that appears on the homepage should be attached to members MoT profiles.

The feed should be curated, not everything should appear, it could be a mixture of upvotes or inhouse curation/moderation.

Those blog posts could be auto-fed into their profiles, or people could write posts directly from MoT if a writing thing could be developed.

MoT could provide blogging prompts where members can be encouraged to write about, these would count towards their profile and give them ā€˜community experienceā€™. The social questions that go out are often great prompts.

People who blog ā€œenoughā€ could earn their way towards free membership or earn specific badges.

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My context. When I became a programmer almost 30 years ago, the internet was bare and not much use, anything you wrote became outdated quickly. Very quickly the stuff you read fell into 2 categories, stuff that ages well, and stuff that does not (invariably all technical content falls into this bucket.)

80% of blogs these days are in the former category and are thus merely covering ground. Unless your blog covers the latter more technical content type, Iā€™m not going to ā€œneedā€ to ever visit again. Soā€¦, in a personal reflection moment, this week we started a new employee nomination thing, to encourage people to nominate colleagues who do good and so on. Gamification if you like, because the prizes are really things like SWAG and so on. Iā€™m a great fan of gamification - but in this case the gamification of identifying company superheroes leaves a bad taste for me. Because historically engineers are reticent to nominate their peers while sales teams seem to have 5 minutes in every hour for micro tasks that bring joy. Creating a huge imbalance in nominations which had to be countered by having ā€œhero quotasā€ split evenly between divisions. So I would be careful that badges stay as just that, ā€œbadgesā€. Keep the competing friendly.

But. Deffo with @rosie , and think people who ā€œworkā€ hardest at content should be rewarded with more than a badge.

Good Habits
A few years ago we used to do a ninja award thing where you could get merch by being especially helpful MOT member. I managed to win it at least twice, by being especially diligent to log in a few times a week and just lurk, or help out. The ninja award was stopped not long after my winning streak, but I had found I had become so motivated to contribute for so long, that I habitually kept contributing, anyway. So I can fully identify with how recognition is a huge community driver. Iā€™m thus saddened when I see really powerful contributors to the general community get flagged with the ā€œItā€™s been a while since weā€™ve seen [personx]ā€¦ā€ . (Note that some of us do have 2 accounts here.) And to be honest, that ties back to my starting point about continuously reading blogs that donā€™t ā€œrelateā€ to my context.

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I just do not think that those who are interested in blogging, should not stop but continue. In my case, it has helped me to write what I like and to share it with the community. Another idea could be where bloggers can share their blog posts about what they wrote on a weekly basis or for the month and people can comment on it or like it.

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts, ideas and comments @tamim, @rosie and @conrad.connected.

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I suppose the challenge with a bloggers club is that itā€™s down to people to write stuff. While MoT provides prompts and a bit of buzz around a topic, perhaps thereā€™s an unmet need there somewhere. Or no need at all.

For me Iā€™ve not written in a while, but thatā€™s more a busy atm rather than anything else.

I like the suggestions from above too. Forming habits is hard.

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Like with any product, you need to figure out what value you are offering, to whom. I canā€™t help but think, if you want to expand bloggers club beyond frequent Club users, youā€™re going to need to also ask this question in others ways. And of course, maybe you already are.

For me, I treated it as an extension to the regular Twitter and LinkedIn questions on social media. And I engaged when:

  1. They were regular, and consistent so I got used to seeing them and interacting with them
  2. I could relate, and I had something to say in response to the question they posed

I disengaged when they stopped being consistent, or when the subjects where not something I related with.

I think this has merit, especially if you adopted existing software platforms (like Forem, where many Dev communities live). Why? Because for those of us who already cross post to multiple platforms, we are happy for another target, but not another format!

For me personally, Iā€™m already producing content on my own blog(s) and cross posting onto other platforms. So I would appreciate finding ways to retain syndication (the blog feeds for existing blogs) and generally keeping other blog platforms as first class citizens. That is iā€™d appreciate the platform as an additive, but I wouldnā€™t want to move everything I have over here.

Also, when you say ā€œmedium for testingā€, remember medium is a monetized platform. One element you maybe missing here, is the ā€œblogs for cashā€ element that powers a lot of content, via sponsorship, ads or people building their own brand or product. Maybe you do mean that? But it feels like potentially a big commitment with everything else youā€™re already on with :slight_smile:

Working to remove barriers to entry for more people writing articles for MoT sounds like a great idea, and need not be instead of Bloggers Club or having an MoT Blog Platform.

Infact, you if you had capacity for such things, you could have a process where blog posts on an MoT Platform could be selected to be worked into an article, by going through editorial work.

Iā€™d love to see things accelerate, with:

  1. New topics ~2 weeks, with a choice of say 3 related topics not just one headline
  2. Intentional hooks and nods to MoT events where it makes sense, build that buzz and keep things related!
  3. Some kind of curated / editorial summary of the blogs posted on the topics within the 2 weeks. Gives a deadline to aim for, and some reward by recognising the contributions more actively
  4. If there any really stand-out entries, encourage and support that blogger to put in the extra effort to write it up as an MoT article
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