Seven ways to blog without actually starting a blog

A couple weeks ago, Lindy and I decided to swap blog posts. She had an idea about how to blog without having a blog, and I had read a sweet little story in the Washington Post about pac-man images virally wandering down the windows of office buildings on Vermont Avenue in DC.

So here's mine. Lindy, please add to this in the comments if I forgot anything!

Seven ways to practice blogging, without actually starting a blog:

1. Write a guest post on someone else's blog. Maybe you know a blogger and have an interesting thought you could share on the topics they write about. Ask them to post it under their own blog as a guest post, or just as a quote without stating your name if you prefer, and see what feedback you get. (Anyone wants to guest post for me feel free to contact me! Now that I am syndicated, I'm committed to 25 posts a month, so I'm sure I can use the help...!)

2. Microblog on Twitter - this is one very important use of Twitter, namely sharing links to interesting sites, or microblogging a conference. Use Summize (aka twitter search since they bought it, but I still call it Summize), Twemes (make sure you add a hash (#) to your keywords) or Tweetmarks to track any comments you get on those links.

3. Sign up to MyBlogLog and join some communities, add some links to interesting sites or posts, comment on stuff...

4. Start a Friendfeed room, or just join Friendfeed and start commenting on others' links and participating in discussions. Here's the Non-Profit Technology room as an example.

5. Use the "Shared" page in Google Reader to share lots of links to posts you find interesting, and comment on them. The page has an RSS feed and can be given a customized template so it even looks like a blog. Here's mine. Note that this page is all the stuff I am reading that I find interesting, but none of it is from my own blog. I also have not specifically commented on my shared items, but in Google Reader you can click a button to "Share with note" as well as just "Share".

6. Use Delicious to keep track of your comments on others' blogs. Dennis McDonald has a great example of this in action here, where he tags his comments as "comments" and can thereby keep them in one place.

7. Blog within a social network. Here's SNAP. Join and you can post blog posts within the group.

So - do you see a common theme here? Almost all of these suggestions involve your commenting on other's posts, commenting on others' links and commenting on others' comments. That is what we want. We would not be blogging, not be sharing links, not be tweeting links, not be joining communities if we didn't want others to engage with us. Jumping into this river is a little bit scary, but if you start by getting used to leaving comments, that will take you a long way towards becoming comfortable with the medium, and then you'll be able to make that leap into blogging for real. I know a LOT of people who started by reading, then commenting, and now have their own great blogs. It's your turn now!