Big Announcement! Battle is Joined!

A gun fires the signal to start, the contestants are out of the gates in a rush, the crowds roar with excitement... no, this isn't a horse race, it's a blog contest!

Last week my friend Jon was thinking about all the stuff he'd been doing, all the stuff I'm doing and what we could both do better. I think he's been wanting to write for quite some time, but hadn't found a topic to write about or a place to write it. He sent me a message on Skype: "You and I should have a blog off! That might actually modivate both of us to become better bloggers" and so it began.

The rules: After discussing what a fair and reliable metric would be, we decided to use daily views averaged over a week and tallied monthly to measure our progress. If that sounds confusing, don't worry about it, we'll be keeping track ourselves. We've got October to start building a following and we'll be measuring monthly starting November 14th. If either one of us quits writing after a decisive win and loses viewers, the win is forfeited. We'll also be cross linking and coordinating some of our posts to boost our total audience.

How you can help: Just keep reading. Tell your friends, write comments, join in the discussion, send me ideas, ask me to research things and keep coming back. The more you demand of me, the more I will deliver. Share my writing on Facebook, on twitter, on Google +, whatever you use. I have links to help you do that on each of my posts. If some part of my blog isn't working, let me know so I can fix it. I want to win, of course, and the way I'll do that is with you're help.

My first entry: The ideas behind this contest are actually pretty interesting. To fix a motivation in the mind to continue to perform a certain action (blog posting) on a more regular and frequent basis we set up a reward for success, and an accountability program to measure that success. Here, the anticipation of a reward (kudos, bragging rights, more followers, beating Jon at something) will be used as my drive and energy to complete the task set before me and build the habit of writing more regular updates to this currently pitiful blog. The writing will hopefully improve as a result of scrutiny, or at least not backslide. The topics will hopefully be more accessible to a wider audience, though no less biting. During this exercise, which I hope will last years, I will try to exercise increasing amounts of self control to post entries more often and more regularly to please my audience.

For now, the reward is purely anticipatory, though as the contest continues it should become a learned association between writing blogs and winning bragging rights and readers. Having intellectually set the parameters of the contest, both of us participants await the benefits from classically conditioning ourselves to better behaviours. To those of my readers unfamiliar with classical conditioning, it was first formally observed by Ivan Pavlov when he trained his dogs to salivate to the ringing of a bell. I will compare the current design to his: The unconditioned stimulus presented to the dogs was a bit of meat or meat powder. For this contest, the stimulus is recognition. The unconditioned response to the presentation of that meat was salivation. For the contest, the response is pride or happiness. The unconditioned stimulus was then paired with a neutral stimulus, a bell, by presenting them together and observing the response of salivation. Our neutral stimulus is blog posting, which is paired by the artificial recognition in addition to the generated recognition of our audience as it grows. After a while, the bell can produce salivation without the meat. Soon, I hope to enjoy posting regular blogs whether anyone reads them or not.

In addition to the classical conditioning, we'll use a feedback loop to gauge performance. The number of viewers a post receives initially will show how relevant or immediately interesting a topic is. The number of viewers a post continues to get will show how much it resonates with the audience. The month to month analysis of results also serves as a feedback loop because it is on going and allows us to gauge personal performance in comparison to another. Basically, The feedback loop will encourage both Jon and I to alter our blogging tactics to attract more readers.

I can go a bit further along this topic of motivation and needs. I can reference Maslow's Hierarchy and where the blogging fits into it. Maslow's Hierarchy, in short is a list of needs that must be accomplished in order. Once one is fulfilled, a person can move along to the next until a more basic need must be re-fulfilled.

This blog post and contest can work toward all three of the upper tiered needs. It works toward love and belonging by putting ideas out there that friends and family may find interesting in one way or another and thus promote closeness. It builds esteem by soliciting favorable responses from others, whether I know them personally or not. It promotes my self-concept and encourages a growth in respect and other social standing. Trolls, though they will be deleted, may also serve as a measure of success as they mostly target highly public Internet venues. Finally, this blog and contest build my self-actualization in that I am allowed to be creative, be spontaneous, and solve problems. Any other parts of this that people read into it are probably relevant, but I will not claim them specifically here.

Finally: I'll wrap up this post by thanking Jon for the wonderful idea. We were going to share links to each other on this first post but he isn't quite ready and thought to distract me with a puzzle. The jumble of characters below is actually a puzzle that he made. I asked him if it would be appropriate for me to share it with my audience and he told me it would be. Anyone cracking the puzzle may be offered some small prize I haven't decided on yet. Post answers in the comments and expect a later post to announce the first correct solution and an actual link to the competing blog, like I originally planned to include here.

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