Creative blogging strategies: Oblique Strategies

Blogging can be tough. It's hard work coming up with clever things to say, interesting tidbits to post week in, week out. Any blogger who's been blogging for a while knows the feeling of 'blogger's block'!

Don't worry, you're not alone if you've experienced a blogging malaise. Creative people have been developing strategies for overcoming the blocks, dead ends and barriers that hinder great work for centuries.

One of the most famous was developed in the 1970s by musician and record producer Brian Eno: A deck of cards named Oblique Strategies: Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas.

Oblique Strategies is a deck of cards, each card containing a piece of advice, an aphorism or question designed to jolt the user into approaching the problem from a different angle, including:

• Honour thy error as a hidden intention.
• Put in earplugs.
  
• Retrace your steps.
• Do nothing for as long as possible.
• Ask people to work against their better judgment
  

Eno stated in an interview that:

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude."

Consulting Eno's Oblique Strategies may not work for you, but perhaps developing your own way of introducing random elements into your blogging process could help you to achieve better results. Or perhaps simply wearing earplugs while you blog will be enough...

Using RSS feeds

If you're an avid blogger, chances are that you read a whole lot of other blogs. It can be time consuming to keep track of every single blog you're interested in by actually visiting the blog to see if it's updated.

The good news is that you don't have to if you use RSS feeds. Now, I know 'RSS feed' is a funny name but really there's nothing to it!

An RSS feed is kind of like getting email from a website. Once you're subscribed to an RSS feed using a reader, you automatically receive the new content as an email every time the blog is updated.

Some popular readers include Google Reader and Technorati (which can also be used to promote your blog, as we'll see in a minute) but there are hundreds!

Here's a quick video that explains RSS feeds in plain English.



Of course, the other great thing about RSS feeds is that you can use them to promote your blog. You can do this by signing up for an account with RSS providers like Technorati and Feedburner. Keeping track of your feed in this way allows you to see how many subscribers you have and gives you access to a range of other methods for promoting your blog.

It's also a good idea to 'ping' search engines and other services using site such as Ping-o-Matic.

Ping-o-Matic sends out a 'ping' to tell everyone that your blog has been updated. All you need to do is enter the address of your blog and...'ping' - out it goes! This is especially good for telling search engines you've updated as Google loves websites with brand-new content.