Up until a week or so ago, I felt I was playing a massive game of catch-up following our cross-country move and completion of our new house in Washington. I purposely lined up a slew of new Q&A interviews with story practitioners to run during this period when I felt I might not have time to meet my personal commitment of 7/365 blog entries.
During some of its life, the purpose of this blog has been to curate storytelling news and bring it to the attention of fans of applied storytelling. That’s a purpose I mostly haven’t been able to fulfill during these hectic months. Fortunately, other bloggers/tweeters like Gregg Morris, Michael Margolis, and Cathryn Wellner are doing a better job with that function than I’ve been able to.
Another function I’ve tried to fulfill with this blog is to synthesize and analyze story news. To find connections among various items about storytelling. To speculate about what it all means. To look at one story application and imagine how it could be applied to a different function. We could call this process “remixing” timely story topics.
I also noticed recently that readership of this blog is down significantly over last year. Speculations:
- Natural attrition that probably happens to most blogs.
- Readers are tired of the Q&As. I was running a lot of Q&As at this time last year, though, when readership was higher.
- Readers see my entries as lame and/or rushed.
- Readers prefer to get their story news sooner — hot news as opposed to warmed-over.
I employ several techniques for keeping up with the storytelling world and have kept all these communication channels open during the time I’ve been preoccupied. I could simply skip the last five months during which I was not consistently monitoring the storytelling world. After all, in the social-media world and the blogosphere, content becomes stale incredibly quickly.
But maybe I can revisit story content from the last five months and add a new twist, a new insight, a new synthesis, a new application.
Let’s try it and see how it goes. I welcome your input and feedback.