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Friday Self-Promotions Are Powerful

Here I’m going to borrow (okay, steal outright) an idea from author, bacon cat wrangler, serial comma hater, and velvet Wesley Crusher commissioner, blogger John Scalzi and his ever-so-delicately named “pimp threads.” [In the interests of full disclosure, I have worked with John previously. Although he is much more famous than I am.]

In the best traditions of user-generated content and enlightened self-interest, pimp threads are a variation of open threads, which are the blog version of “Open Phone” segments of radio call-in shows, where callers can talk about whatever they want (assuming they can get past the screeners).

Open threads fulfill a variety of roles — for topical blogs, they give participants a watercooler space to socialize with people they’ve gotten to know around the organizing topic. In higher traffic blogs, open threads give people a chance to recirculate traffic and dip into the well of eyeballs (what a lovely visual) and get some attention for things that they’re doing (a pimp thread is an explicit permission to do this). And, of course, since open threads consist almost entirely of user-generated content, the users do all the work, and the blogger gets to fill in another spot on the content calendar.

Anyway, in my take on the concept (”Self-Promotions Are Powerful”), here’s an open entry where you, dear reader, in the comments, can promote yourself, talk about what you’re doing, link to your resume or profile, show off a domain where you’re doing something cool, or otherwise point people to something that you feel deserves attention, eyeballs, and a little link love.

A few caveats:

* This is an experiment. We’ll have to see how it works. Also, just because the first one is on a Friday doesn’t not mean they’ll all be on Fridays.

* Comment moderation is still in effect. Comments will still be approved by someone over here. This is so that…

* Spam comments are still forbidden and will not be published. I realize that this might be counterintuitive on something called a self-promotion thread, but anything that is obviously spam, affliliate linkfarming, clickfraud, astroturfing, malware delivering, or anything else that is remotely shady is out. The rule of thumb is, add value by being useful or interesting — it’s the difference between self-promotion and being a shill.

On a social media note, a more formalized version of the self-pimping/self-promotion is the “Blog Carnival” concept, where bloggers submit entries (usually ones that they’ve previously published themselves) for inclusion into a collection of posts. They’re usually self-promotional in nature, and may be general or themed — there’s a whole directory of blog carnivals you can peruse.

Anyway, if you’ve got something interesting you’d like to promote, please leave a comment below and let us know what it is.

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