WordPress Offers Content Encouragement with Plinky

In an effort to relieve writer’s block woes, Automattic (news, site), the company behind WordPress, has acquired a content encouragement service called Plinky.

Essentially, Pinky provides writers with prompts aimed at inspiring content.

The solution was kicked out last year by Thing Labs, a company founded by ex-Googler Jason Shellen. Sadly, in April it was announced that they were too consumed with work on another solution of theirs, Brizzly, to continue updating Plinky.

“We put a lot of work into [Plinky], and we think it’s a great site,” said the company’s announcement. “At the same time, we feel we have much more to offer with Brizzly than we ever could have with Plinky.”

Enter Automattic. The content-loving company purchased Shellen’s discarded solution (for an undisclosed amount) hoping to provide WordPress users with a way to get back into the writing game.

“We’ve all been there — those days when the light bulb seems dim, if not burned out,” said Automattic’s Joy Victory. “To give you a little creative push and get that writerly mojo flowing again, we’ve added a new service called Plinky.com. Each weekday, Plinky provides a prompt — like a question or a challenge — and you type in an answer.”

Whether or not it will actually inspire posts remains to be seen, but, in any case, it’s nice to see one man’s digital trash become another man’s digital treasure.

The solution has already been implemented, but you have to have to sign up for a Plinky account separately if you want to use it. Then, add your WordPress.com blog to Plinky and start creating.

What is Blog?

A blog originally was a personal website meant to be like a diary or journal. If you are familiar with Facebook or MySpace, these sites and their user pages are a derivative of blogs. The word blog is the shortened version of the word weblog. A person would usually create a blog as a hobby to share their information and experience on a particular subject. The blogs are designed to be very easy to add new entries to, so the information on blogs is updated much more frequently than a traditional site. As the blogger adds entries to the blog, the viewers can add comments to the entries, so the blog becomes an interactive site. If the blogger is interesting it does not take long for that blog to create quite a following.

Blogs have been around for a few years now and have been heavily commercialized for business blogging so that today as you surf the web you often do not know if you are looking at a blog website or a traditional html website. Truth be told though it does not matter what type of website it is, they are both designed to do the same thing…. get information out to the public.

There is a common misconception that blogging requires a certain level of sophistication and that the whole process is complicated. I assure you that driving a car is much more complicated than blogging. The fact that you have found this article is proof enough that you can blog. If you have a passion for something, whatever the subject is, and you want to tell others what you know about that subject, you can be a big help to someone else who is interested in the subject but does not have the experience or knowledge about it that you do. That is the spirit behind blogs and it is why blogs are such a huge part of the internet culture of our day.

If you want to know more about blogging, how you can create your own blog, what kind of topics can you cover, the costs ($0) or requirements involved, check out this blogging guide but at least for now you know what is blog.