Skribit Review – Get rid of writer’s block
Blogging could be a hobby, passion, addiction or routine for bloggers depending on how may months or years they were into blogging. The ability to write continuously could be further influenced by the motivation levels, returns in terms of monetary benefits and goodwill etc.
What is writer’s block?
Wikipedia defines Writer’s block as follows:
Writer’s block is a phenomenon involving temporary loss of ability to begin or continue writing, usually due to lack of inspiration or creativity.
Lack of inspiration or creativity directly translates to not having enough topics in mind to write about. And that is where Skribit comes handy.
What is skribit?
Skribit is a little widget that sits on your blog where the readers can submit topics that they want you to write about. They can also vote those topics so that the priority is clear. It is as simple as that. Some additional features include the possibility to comment on topics etc.
Now, if you chose to write about the submitted topic, you can directly link the related post to the topic via your Skribit account management page. This will help to alert the reader, who submitted the topic, that his/her topic has been written about.
The Skribit widget is available for Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad blogging platforms and it claims to help bloggers overcome the writer’s block.
Does it really work?
I have no clue because I am trying it only now. You can see my Skribit widget in action on the sidebar of this blog. So give it a try by submitting topics and you could even try the Skribit widget on your blog.
The other thing I am not sure about is how does the bloggers using Skribit manage spam? Basically, anybody - not just Skribit account holders - can submit topics though fortunately, to post comments on topics, one needs to login to his/her Skribit account.
I was intending to write about how to overcome Writer’s block in yet another post. But the wikipedia link I mentioned earlier has some great tips out there that you might want to read as well.
August 5th, 2008 at 12:42 am
Hey I just visited your site for the first time and I wanted to say that I like what you’ve done here. Good luck with bloggin and keep up the great work. I’ll come and check on you frequently!
Tony
August 5th, 2008 at 1:07 am
Thanks Tony. Keep visiting us and also please feel free to provide any topic suggestions
Ajith
August 5th, 2008 at 8:19 am
Ajith,
I tried Skirbit for a while. Only thing is it needs an active user base to be successful. I believe it will work well in a forum or technology blogs where a lot of comments are posted and exchanged. Let me know your experience with it personally.
August 5th, 2008 at 9:44 am
It’s a pretty great solution overall, however it might be a bit hard for small blogs to get a large number of suggestions, that is when they go and steal the suggestions from other blogs using Skirbit
August 5th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
@Rajeev, you are so right. It may make more sense with forum/technology blogs. With MMO and blogging tips blogs, the topics are pretty much predefined may be. Still, it may be useful if somebody is asking for any product reviews etc
@Rajaie, definitely smaller blogs/bloggers need other means of getting ideas to write about as well. Hopefully, all of us will become bigtime bloggers soon
Cheers,
Ajith
August 6th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
[...] #1: Lack of motivation and/or creativity or writer’s block, as mentioned in my last post, can be one of the major reasons behind the decision to stop a blog. Laziness and inability to read [...]
November 3rd, 2008 at 10:53 am
Update: The skribit widget was taken out of the sidebar, sometime back…
November 4th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
[...] from what is known as the ‘writer’s block’. I had written a short post sometime back on using the skribit widget to get rid of writer’s block. In this post I would like to share some methods that I personally [...]