Try Out a Blog Crawl

Over at Dust Bunny Club of North America, Journaler Dornbrau has a blogging activity you might want to take for a spin -- she calls it a Blog Crawl; it's similar to other types of group theme blogging activities (like carnivals, etc.), except... well, it has a graphic:

Dorn's inaugural Blog Crawl theme is Back to Nature -- interpret that as you will, and see her blog entry for full details. (Submit by January 25, 2007, and don't forget to use the blog crawl tag.)

Now, over here at AOL Blogs High Command, we like this kind of user self-programming (or self-created activities -- whatever you want to call it), mostly because you guys do everything: coming up with the ideas, gathering the links, summarizing entries, etc., and it has been established that I am -- I mean, we are -- extraordinarily lazy.

All we have to do is highlight stuff that you're doing. (And oftentimes, even that is just icing -- a lot of these things are self-sustaining, even without any kind of linking. Though it usually doesn't hurt.)

Selecting and hand-posting links to this blog and the AOL Blogs main page is only a interim step -- it doesn't scale very well, especially as more people do stuff. (Though for right now, if you've got a group blogging activity you want to highlight, please send it to me and I'll see what I can do.)

Certain things, like blog memes (such as the Five Things tagging) take on a life of their own and spread virally, without any kind of intervention.

Other things, like Plittle's CarnivAOL, or my earlier Six-Pack Picks (which I may bring back in 2007) center around a single site and blogger to collect links and wrangle participants.

Tagging helps, as do feed display modules and other kinds of automation -- the AOL Blogs main page is due for a refresh this season, anyway, so we'll be exploring ways to better highlight things that you folks and other bloggers are doing.

Anyway, for the rest of this week, I'll be purging my 2006 blogging slush pile and some other stuff, so stay tuned.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol blogs, aol journals, aol blogs high command, extraordinarily lazy, self-programming