OK this is a bit of a weird content experiment. Please bear with me
I’ve been wanting to figure out how to write more, in general
You might know that writing one of these essays, when I do it for real, is like several hours of work
Thus, playing around with the idea that constraints are helpful for writing shorter, but more often
tweets are are the most obvious example with short characters
many other different types of constraints might work too
couple ideas
Slides. Make every essay a slide deck. You make a visual slide and then underneath it, put a bunch of bullets. This might work particularly well since it’s sort of become the most popular thing in business to communicate via deck. here’s kind of an example
Bullets. Like what you’re reading now. I’ve also done an experiment here where I typed out a “roadmap” for my blogging in the next year. And then started to implement it (which was hard). But the actual outline itself was interesting content
Word length is also interesting. Like trying to keep everything I post under 1000 words
Audio is the other one. Just recording content, maybe having it auto-transcripted, and just seeing where that goes
I also like the concept of AMAs as a way to generate content. For example I answered a question about Facebook’s DAU/MAU on Quora and then just cross-posted on my blog, which was pretty cool
the downside of this is that it’s a little weird to read
the upside argument is that there’s been a lot of social media type innovations that have just come from making content creation much easier even if theoretically as a viewer you’d prefer something different. Ephemeral content — like Snapchat and Stories — is the obvious example
Tbh this is my first time writing like this. Not sure it actually is making me write faster. But it’s a little weird and interesting. It definitely saves me from wasting time on transitions between topics
Other idea I’ve been thinking about is to take a couple big umbrella topics and then writing very long megaoutlines underneath them, and blogging away. Especially with stories and so on
Example: Viral growth
What is viral growth - buzz and word of mouth, versus viral loops
Building Viral loops
Piggybacking on an existing platform
Viral factor
Optimizing loops
A/B testing
Landing pages
Optimizing each step
Invites
Increasing # of recipients — all at once, versus over time
Anyway, you get the picture. Each one of these sections could be its own blog post, and then I could link to stuff. Could be fun
OK - more to come.
Thanks for humoring me on this weird new format!