In an attempt to catch up a bit, let’s tackle the next challenge. The task is simple. Ask a compelling question and let you, the reader, comment and thus have the compelling story be told in the comments and not in the post itself.

Here’s my question(s): Those of you who use Twitter, what do you think makes it so compelling and sticky (i.e., challenging to walk away from)? Those of you who don’t use Twitter, have you tried it and walked away or are you avoiding it altogether? Either way, why?

I know a number of you have answered this question in one context or another, but I’d like to see a nice long list of responses that might help someone looking at Twitter for the first time see many sides of the Twitter discussion. Give me three words. Or give me three paragraphs. Fire away.

As happens with so many endeavors in my life, my initial zest and enthusiasm for the comment challenge has waned somewhat. It’s not that I’m not still interested, just that I’m tired and blogging on a daily basis is not my MO. This particular challenge asks me to elevate a discussion that’s taking place in my comments to the next level by turning it into a post.

I was fairly disinclined to complete this task for what I thought was a pretty obvious reason: If I’d thought a comment or set of comments was worth a new blog post, I’d have already written one. But in the spirit of participation, I do want to touch on one point that was raised by multiple people in my post on Stepping into Marketing.

What I learned is that I’m being pretty fast and loose with my use of the word marketing. Stephen Kellat points out, in espousing the need for data and demographic info, that “Marketing is okay, I suppose, if seen merely as a synonym for promotion.” Tim Keneipp, who begins his thoughts in the comments, but ultimately takes the conversation over to his blog, had this to say: “I think what Greg and some of the others are really talking about is librarians becoming active public relations ambassadors and not really marketing.” If I remember correctly, Tim has a marketing background, so he certainly would know better than I would. The back and forth between him and me on his blog post is worth reading.

Of course, I’ve since spent a little time digging into the term marketing and getting a better grip on the broader processes that the term indicates. I’m not so sure that I won’t still be using it as my catch-all term for activities that, for example, are geared toward elevating the presence and position of librarians within the context of social media. But at least I’ll now be better aware of my bastardization of the term.

What I want to stress though is my awareness that I have no idea what I’m talking about. My thoughts on marketing, promotion, public relations, etc., are nascent at best. That’s why I toss them out here, bandy them about with y’all and see what sticks. Your comments are profoundly helpful in forcing me to better articulate my ideas and wrap my head around things. So keep challenging me. (I welcome agreement too!)

I’m a little behind on the challenge and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. Day 12’s challenge has us assessing how easy or difficult we make it for people to comment.

I won’t belabor the assessment with too much detail here. I moderate first-time commenters and that’s enough to keep out the spam. I don’t want to make moderation a consistent nuisance for people who visit regularly.

I’ve added a Live Comment Preview plugin at Steve Lawson’s suggestion to reduce anxiety about a comment not appearing with the format that the commenter intended. I don’t have captchas or anything like that. I do have it set to require a name and email address, although you could fake that easily enough, I suppose. Maybe I’ll remove that requirement, but I’m not really interested in anonymous commenting. Thoughts on that? Is there something you see that I should be doing differently? I’m open to suggestions.

After a packed Mother’s Day weekend, I find myself a day behind in the challenge. It’s time to lay out a comment policy. I think I can do this fairly succinctly.

Everyone is invited to comment, but you’ll need to provide a name and email address. Commenting in both text and video form are available on every blog post. If you don’t want your comments displayed publicly, you can use the contact form to communicate with me. If you’ve never commented here before (or your comment has three or more links in it), your comment will be added to my moderation queue and I’ll need to approve it before it appears. This is primarily for anti-spam purposes. If I seem to be taking a long time moderating your comment, drop me a line.

I expect that commenters will be civil and will attack ideas and not people. Further, I reserve the right to censor or delete anything on this blog at any time. That said, I’d be loathe to do so. You’d really have to violate my personal sensibilities somehow. In the unlikely event that I should be compelled to edit your comment, I will do so in as transparent a fashion as possible. So don’t worry about it too much. Speak your mind. The lines are open.

Today’s mission is to perform a comment audit on my blog. The idea is to check your blog against the Six Reasons People Aren’t Commenting on Your Blog.

So let’s do it.

1. You sound like a press release.

For the most part, no. I do like the plug the show occasionally, but I don’t think I do that in an impersonal way.

2. You sound like an infomercial.

I don’t think so.

3. You sound like a know-it-all.

I’m guessing that I’m occasionally guilty of this. I do have pretty strong opinions sometimes and that might dissuade some people from entering into a conversation about them. Hard to self-diagnose though.

4. You haven’t showed them how.

I could do a better job laying out my comment policy and walking people through the moderation structure in place. I suspect that I’ll have a chance to do this over the next 21 days.

5. You haven’t created the right atmosphere.

I think I do an OK job of employing a conversational tone on this blog. Walt Crawford described my blog as having “strong voice” (pdf), by which he means that you “hear” a lot of the author in the writing. I think of this as a good thing, in terms of welcoming conversation. But again, that strong voice might have the opposite effect sometimes (see answer 2).

6. You just don’t seem that into it.

I sure hope not. When I’m not that into it, I don’t write.

The number and quality of the comments I’ve received on recent non-Comment-Challenge-related posts indicates to me that I’m doing a fair job initiating conversations. You’d tell me if I was wrong, wouldn’t you?

OK, so I’m a little late with this item. Yesterday, we were tasked with considering this question: “should we be using the commenting capacity to generate conversations between bloggers, or should we be interacting through our blog posts?”

I wasn’t even aware of a debate over this issue until I learned about Seth Godin’s lack of comments on his blog. There was some debate over whether you could even call it a blog if you don’t allow comments. And let me say with conviction that yes, you can have a blog without allowing comments.

But on to the question at hand. I’m sure it’s obvious to most readers that I believe in promoting conversations with whatever means are available: your blog, my blog, text comments, video, whatever. So I don’t really have a preference for commenting on the original blog or taking your thoughts back to your blog and expanding the conversation there. Do what feels right.

I suppose it depends on whether you want to draw your blog’s readership into the discussion or not. It might also depend on whether you genuinely have something new to say. I’m not sure I’d write a post just for the sake of saying “Yeah, what she said.” Length of the comment might also be a factor, but I’m not sure I’d make that the primary factor in any situation. I don’t think there’s a simple prescriptive approach to making the “correct” decision. I wouldn’t obsess about it either way. Again, do what feels right.

Today, we were encouraged to find a blog outside of our normal reading domains and comment. The instructions du jour suggested starting with the Technorati Blog Directory. Browsing the categories, I thought I’d check out the science blogs and see if I could find something worth commenting on.

There were a few good options, but i settled on a blog called EcoGeek, where I found a post listing six ways to save massive quantities of gasoline. I read through the comments and found a comment that added a seventh way that really resonated with me: telecommuting. My comment echoes that notion. I added my comment and it inexplicably disappeared on refresh. So I tried to add it again. Same effect. Maybe it’s a moderation thing, but I’m not sure I’ve left a comment at all. Confused.

There are plenty of comments on the post, most of an above average length. Not sure if that’s typical of the eco-science blog community or not. I’m guessing it is. But it doesn’t appear that the original blogger is participating in the ongoing conversation, which is disappointing. The topic itself is interesting and important, so it’s encouraging to see so much discussion surrounding it. I’d probably read more blogs in this topic area, but I’ve already hit my saturation point (and then some) on text feeds.

This past winter, my wife registered my eldest son and I to attend toddler storytime at our local library. It was a special eight-week winter program for two and three year olds. I loved it. It quickly became “our thing,” the one activity that my son and I shared without Mommy and without his younger brother. When the eight weeks was up, I, for one, didn’t want it to end. Neither did he. The children’s librarian was unable to keep it going as she needed to start gearing up for summer reading.

So I did what any father/librarian would do. I offered to keep it going myself. Well, let me rephrase that. I suggested that the parents who were in attendance might do well to try to keep the momentum going and organize our own weekly storytime at the same time and in the same place as the program that was ending. There seemed to be enough interest for me to pursue it further. I left with a list of names, phone numbers and email addresses.

Having clearly assumed some sort of leadership role, my next move was to speak to the director. I’d completed my practicum requirements by working for my local library, so I already had a relationship with the staff, including the director. She was very enthusiastic about the idea and offered use of the storytime room, as long as there weren’t schedule conflicts with anything that had already been planned.

I emailed the group and invited folks to bring books, music, crafts, bubbles, whatever they felt like contributing and that we’d wing it as far as how to bring all those things together. Before we’d even made it to the first gathering, one person volunteered to do paper airplanes as our first craft. Awesome!

The first grassroots storytime (as I affectionately call it) brought five kids and four parents and a grandparent. As it turns out, the grandparent is also a first-grade teacher and she came prepared. We took turns reading stories to the kids. We played Ring Around the Rosie. The kids danced around to a recording of Five Little Monkeys. And of course, we made paper airplanes. It was a ton of fun.

We’ve had four or five storytimes since. The number of people in attendance has varied. Last week, only two pairs showed up and it was a beautiful day, so we decided to head to the park instead. The kids loved it.

Now I’m thinking about how we draw some additional participants without letting it become unmanageable and less fun for the kids already involved. I don’t know if I have any answers…yet. But I wanted to take a moment to share this experience and ask if anyone else has patron-run storytime groups in their library. It seemed natural for me to take over a needed service that the library could no longer support, but, well, I suppose I’m not the average patron. And, of course, it wouldn’t have been possible without a director willing to say yes.

I need to jump ahead as tomorrow is recording day for Uncontrolled Vocabulary and I’m not likely to have time to complete this task then.

I’m to identify three things I’ve learned in the first week of this challenge. Here they are:

1. I still have problems with logorrhea, despite my awareness of the problem.
2. Video commenting is actually rather awesome, despite the drawbacks.
3. I really, really, really like when people comment here and there is major upside to responding to comments left on your blog, even if you don’t have a ton to say in response. (OK, I’m going to admit that I actually learned this lesson over the past month or so, but it’s been reinforced this past week.)

Gosh, that was easy. Looking forward to the remaining days of the Challenge.