‘Crowdsourcing’ blog content

Kiwis, I'll ask again, but I'm sharing NZ music on my blog this month and I welcome suggestions (embeddable link needed). What do you love?
— Arthur Schenck (@AmeriNZ) May 2, 2014

If I’d thought it out better, I’d have been more organised for my New Zealand Music Month (NZMM) posts. But, for me, this is entirely improvised, so it makes sense that’s how I’m approaching it is, too.

Last night, I turned to Twitter (see above) for suggestions on what music to share. It’s not that I’ll have trouble coming up with ideas—it’s far more likely that I’ll have trouble narrowing them down! Instead, I thought I’d get suggestions for artists or songs that I might not have known about.

Twitter rewarded that faith. In the days ahead, that “crowdsourced content” will show up on this blog.

I wasn’t kidding about not having thought this out—my first NZMM post was a spur of the moment thing because of a Tweet from Dave Dobbyn. At the time, I was only thinking about sharing some songs/artists, not sharing something every day. But once I started, I realised that would be kind of fun.

It’s also a challenge. It’ll help if I write posts in advance—there’s no reason not to, after all. However, there are other things I’ll want to say, too, so some days there could easily be a few different posts (including the NZMM ones).

This has an advantage for me: I’m more likely to make my goal of an average of one post a day over the course of the year. Including this post, I’m eight posts short of that average for this point of the year. I know that I’ll struggle in other months this year, so if I can build up a bit of a buffer, so much the better. Also, I’ll have something to post even on the days I’m not inspired by anything else. I know that no one cares about any of that except me, but it IS my blog after all—of course I care about that sort of stuff.

So I hope there’ll daily NZMM posts. We’ll see.