Hosting a Blog Challenge

Many bloggers will agree that the interaction that takes place between them and the other bloggers is the most satisfying part of blogging.  The best way to establish interaction between your blog and the other bloggers is to create a challenge but hosting this challenge may at times feel more like a burden than it does a blessing.  You need an idea that you think will take off and then you have to choose a theme and figure out the details of how your challenge will work.  Some bloggers are here to do their own thing and they will ignore all the challenges, but if you find the right challenge for you, this can also be a rewarding part of blogging.  I guess the most popular challenge here on WordPress is the one-word challenge, where you are given a prompt word and then you need to use this prompt word in your post as you see fit.  There are also first line story starter prompts which sort of follow the same format, but these will give you a better idea of where to start your writing.

I guess the next most popular challenge is the photo prompt, where you are given a picture and you are supposed to craft your story or poem around that.  I see a lot of sharing challenges, where you answer questions and talk about yourself, but some people will tend to overshare information and that can get weird.  Something that is similar to this is the question challenges where you may respond to something by adding your thoughts to questions that are posed or provocative, or simply follow the directions that you are given.  There are challenges where people post pictures of flowers and talk about their plants, but I have never entered one of those.  There are several poetry challenges, and I am certain that these can be enjoyable if you are creative.  One thing that I don’t like is the challenges where you are limited to using a certain number of words, as I feel they cramp my style of free expression, but I guess people enjoy these as they are counting up their words.  There are also those multiple day challenges that have a different prompt for each day in the month.  There are a few music challenges where people follow a theme and share their music.  There are challenges where you can complain and others where you can say what is good in your life and there are also food challenges and photography challenges for bloggers.

The point of these challenges is to inspire people to write and there are usually no winners in these challenges, but all of the participants can be looked at as being winners.  These challenges are usually self-promoting, and they are mostly discovered by making friends with other bloggers and looking at what they write.  When I enter a blogging challenge, I expect the host to read my post or at least make an attempt to read it and although it is not absolutely necessary, I would appreciate some feedback on my response.  If I become a regular participant in this challenge and I never get a like or a comment, that will annoy me, and I will stop participating in this particular challenge.  For the Friday Faithfuls challenge this week I would like to know your thoughts on blogging challenges, which ones you participate in, if you do like to get involved with these things, and why you decided to participate in them.  If you are a host of any blogging challenge, that would be wonderful if you could talk about your challenge.  Also, I would like to know if you feel that the host of a blogging challenge has any responsibility to the participants.  If you would like to talk about Mr. Linky, or the Blue Frog, or when you encounter trouble because the host is not automatically approving your comments or pingbacks, that would also be appropriate.