Posted on February 11, 2010 - by Denis

Exploring Blog Post Formats, Part I

I got inspired to write the next blog entry — yay!

The reason why it’s called “Exploring Blog Post Formats” is that quite a few times I’ve caught myself thinking about rule sets for specific formats for blog posts that would define some kind of nice framework within which it would be easier to express the message that wants to be expressed in the moment of blog entry creation.

(Note: As I’m writing this I’m like… gosh, here goes the software developer within me… those people start generalizing stuff and putting it into “frameworks” before they even get started on solving the real problem at hand… and here I am doing just that again, except that I’m *not* trying to write any software here… but no escape from my geekiness I guess, so I’ll have to just bear with myself… )

These formats I imagine like templates for short yet concise entries. One could call some of them “exercises”, some of them “games” or …

Let’s explore some examples of formats that come to mind… my mind, obviously

Quote Exploration

There are so many great inspirational quotes out there and if you’re following more than a few people on sites like Facebook or Twitter you’ll have come across a lot of those short pieces of wisdom. You might even be at the point where you really don’t want to hear or read more of them, like Anna stated recently:

Maybe it’s just me being a miserable grump, but I find the constant stream of inspirational quotes on Twitter quite annoying. 9 months of non-stop inspiration begins to wear you down.

So yes, of course, too much running inspiring stuff through your head all the time kinda defeats its purpose after a certain point. But if taken in smaller quantities and examined for their true message, implications and applicability quotes can be an awesome source for personal growth.
And this is what I’d love to do with a quote every now and then: Take it, extract some of the multitude of messages that it is able to convey and explore how they actually can be applied to real life. But also I feel that for many quotes it’s important to go even deeper than that, including highlighting the inherent dichotomies and possibly other stuff I can’t verbalize right now… but there’s a lot more to quotes if they should be used as tools for gaining real, lasting and practical insight in addition to just feeling good for a moment.

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Inspiration has left me for now, other things are waiting for me to do them and so we’ll call this the first part of a series of blog entries! Leave a comment with ideas, feedback and anything else you may feel inclined to share.

Love’n hugs,
Denis