Reflections: Keeping the Conversation Going

As we have molded our #eme6414 community, and joined and observed other communities as well over the course of the semester, I think we've been pretty lucky. Our facilitators are experts. We seem to be an active bunch, eager to share and contribute, and with enough of us contributing, it seems easy to keep the momentum going. But as we get further into "the dog days of summer" and blogging starts to become part of our weekly routine, sometimes I have trouble keeping up with things. My posts have become fairly formulaic: Review one of the articles for the week, reflect, review one of the tools, post a new poll. You may have noticed that I didn't post the usual poll this week. I felt that with this formula, I was almost beginning to limit opportunities for interaction, or pushing the discussion further. I would like to add more opportunities for the readers to be involved in content creation, rather than just contributing comments. 

This week I wanted to try something different. 

I did a bit of searching...

lol.

Apparently I'm not the only one having a hard time keeping the conversation going. I wanted to find out what other successful bloggers do to stimulate conversation, and keep their readers both coming back to seek their content, and contributing content that reinforces the notion that they are both valuable parts of a community rather than just talking at people. 

Lo and behold, YouTube had the answer I needed. 

http://youtubecreator.blogspot.com/2015/07/keeping-conversation-going.html

Many popular YouTube channels have the right idea. People love one video and say something like "haha! I love your video about ___It would be great if you did something like that with ____!" 

They take requests. They encourage their followers to determine by vote what happens next, and in doing so they literally keep coming back by popular demand. I mean, who wouldn't watch a video that they helped write the script or the punchlines for? 

Epic rap battles of history, and most makeup tutorials provide excellent examples of this. 

So with just one week in the semester left: I'd like to ask you the reader, what content you would like to see next week? What tools were your favorite? What have we not covered yet? What am I doing right? What would you like to see more of?

And even though it's scary: as a blogger, what could I be doing better?