I signed up for the Change MOOC. I’d never heard of a MOOC before. But as I learn more, I’m really excited.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to engage with people in conversation on a variety of topics. I’d like to blog more often. But I want to blog about a variety of topics: hockey, running, startups, leadership, knowledge management, change management, problem-solving, what makes a good product, and so on. But there’s probably no single other person in the universe who is interested in all those same subjects. And so I don’t blog that much, as I can’t figure out how to blog in a way that fits my interests but also allows me to have an audience greater than myself. I talk to myself plenty. I don’t need to blog for that.
So what I’ve been thinking about lately is, why can’t I blog about whatever I want on my blog and push various content to the appropriate places relevant to the conversation? If I blog about how great my long run was, I could push that article to my running friends on Facebook. If I blog about a great knowledge management article on HBR, I could push that post to my grad school friends on Google Plus. Okay, nothing is keeping me from doing that today. But it doesn’t really encourage conversation. If my running friends read the running post and then come to my blog to find more, they probably won’t be interested in the knowledge management post and vise versa. But the Change MOOC introduced me to an idea that might fix all this.
Here’s what they do. They defined the #change11 as the hashtag for their event. People are tagging their bookmarks, blog posts, tweets and so on with this tag. Then the organizers are aggregating content across all platforms and highlighting it in a daily email. I don’t have to subscribe to individual blogs or follow individuals on Twitter. I just have to “subscribe” to the topic by getting the daily emails. It’s a great idea. It kind of works. It could work so much better and for many topics.
Suppose there was a place where people could say I’m interested in running content, or knowledge management content or startup content. And I could subscribe to a category. That site then aggregated content across all platforms: Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and so on. So that no matter where the conversation was happening I could follow along. And no matter what I wrote, I could push it to a relevant category with an audience. Now instead of bloggers spamming the crap out of others’ comments just to get an audience, there would be an audience waiting for them. Sure your content would have to be good, as I imagine readers who subscribe to a category could rate content (see Digg) so that the best content is viewed by the most people. But I’m not afraid of having to write good content.
And yes, as a reader I can cobble this together myself by manually searching Twitter and blogs for topics. But I can’t search Google Plus posts and I can’t search my friends shared links on Facebook. And really none of this is easy to do. And as a writer, this would be a dream come true, an easy audience, as long as your writing would be worthy.
More importantly, people can respond and participate on whatever platform they choose. Some people may tweet, others may blog and others yet may post a photo on Flickr. The platform dosen’t matter. But the conversation does.
Why doesn’t this exist? I want to build it.