About

This is the Weekly Blog Club, founded in January in 2012 by a group of people who work in or with the public sector or with charitable trusts or voluntary groups or communities in the UK.

It was started with the thought that it would be a good idea to blog more regularly.

To participate as a writer:

• posts need to be posted before 12 noon each Thursday (this has been a squidgy deadline [see ** below for explanation] at times to allow for technical difficulties and the Week 1 being a very short week).
• we can agree a topic for the week, but people do not need to write about the topic suggested.
• people post on their own blogs and notify us via Twitter – please mention @WeeklyBlogClub in your tweet as well as using the hashtag #WeeklyBlogClub because Twitter has not been displaying all hashtagged tweets.

Type and subjects of posts

Our members write about many different things. We encourage people to think about contributing posts that are primarily visual (a picture or set of pictures and a few sentences can attract many readers), or could be audio, or a movie, or a few well-chosen links to interesting websites or pages, or a poem (we have had several poems and they have always been well-received).

The subjects tackled by our contributors are varied. Some are posts written for or related to work, and have included lots of very useful advice and some guides on how to do things (including writing press releases, using iPhones and similar to take great photos, making short videos for websites and training purposes).

Some are about voluntary work, charities, or leisure time activities. Some are about childcare, families, health, life events and personal issues. The posts can include sports, commentary on the news or politics.

We had a few weeks of sharing themed playlists. We might yet do something similar with pictures, or films, or favourite tea rooms, or poems.

It would be great to have some posts about the professional side of heritage or culture or creative work. Posts about the environment (eg parks or countryside) would probably be welcomed by many of our readers. Science posts would probably be enjoyed by many too.

Collating posts

Links to the posts will be usually be collected and tweeted by this blog (manually), and be collated on here [see List of posts by week] for a more permanent record. We provide a handcrafted summary of all the posts once a week (partly to add some categories and tags), which is usually published on a Sunday. The links in the tweets should also be included by aggregator software in an automatic weekly summary that is automatically tweeted.

Join in any time

You can join in at any time. We prefer to have names of authors because we like blogs that are written by real people. We might ignore posts that appear to be just about creating site traffic or advertising. We want to support people who want to communicate and are happy to include posts written by people in micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (most of the people in small businesses who contribute do also work with the public sector).

…and don’t be afraid if you can’t blog every week

We encourage weekly contributions but it’s a badly-kept secret that we don’t castigate people for not producing a post every week but try to be supportive. We might get concerned about you if you suddenly stop blogging, so you might have to endure a sympathetic question about how you are. We can get rather excited when a previously regular contributor starts writing again.

If you have writer’s block or want a bit of help, just tweet @WeeklyBlogClub and it doesn’t usually take too long before someone responds. There are lots of caring people involved in WeeklyBlogClub who are happy to help if they can.

to participate as a reader:

We suggest:

• looking for and using Like, Favourite, and ratings buttons on people’s blogs to give positive feedback;
• commenting (under your name/Twitter name) on blogs where comments are enabled to give positive feedback;
• giving encouragement via tweets.

Result? People are more likely to continue writing and share more information and thoughts with you.

Contact info and another way of participating

If you want to contact us, please add a comment or tweet @WeeklyBlogClub.

We hope that you find the blog posts of interest. We welcome positive comments.

At some point – probably in 2013, we will have a Weekly Blog Club Camp. We have discussed, and will continue to think about, how Weekly Blog Club might develop in the future, so do put forward ideas.

We (especially I, Janet, since I write most of the posts) welcome volunteers to help look after Weekly Blog Club. Please see Admin info page for what it involves, and leave a message (and tweet) when/if you can help on the Who looks after Weekly Blog Club when page.

Janet

Janet E Davis.

**The Squidgy Deadline has been extended over time so we now have degrees of squidginess:

• Squidgy Deadline generally means by teatime on Thursday.
• Squidgier Deadline tends to mean by bedtime on Thursday.
• Squidgiest Deadline means by brunchtime on Friday. We have  one or two regular bloggers who publish their blogs on Friday who have usually been included under the Squidgiest Deadline.