Copy / Paste Thinking

Where do you find things to blog about? This is a very common question from people who don’t have a blog and wouldn’t think of starting one because, well, what the hell do you write about? 

gnome-stamps Copy / Paste Thinking

How many conversations have you had today? I’m not talking about full-on deep and meaningful debates on a topic, I’m talking about the short exchanges we all have throughout the day. I had at least 30 short conversations with people today. Any of those are potential seeds for a blog entry. 

I work on the web, which means I spend a fair bit of time in my Inbox and that obviously results in quite a large Outbox. Browse through yours right now and see what gems you have unconsciously written. You will find a number of messages that you can very easily Copy, Paste, and Blog. It makes so much sense to reuse the content and build a public collection of thoughts. You are the new media. 

I shared the idea with Steve Hopkins and he applied this idea really well with How to Prototype: The Awesome Guide. The story behind that goes something like.. “Lindsay Gordon wrote an article that we used for an internal publication for how to rapidly prototype, for South East Water. When I saw it I went to her and asked do you want to guest post on my blog? I’ll just copy / paste the article in there as well. Double bonus, because she assumedly sent it to friends as well, and it got some great comments which were really amazing.”

Before you ask, of course this post was Copy / Paste / Blogged – Steve sent me a really long and awesome email and I explained the idea to him. That email was a more personal-level conversation but it only took 2 minutes to edit it for publishing here. 

What posts are waiting in your Outbox to be published?

By Ross Hill - April 14th, 2009 at 1:16pm with 1,219 views -

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  • Good man Tim! That's EXACTLY what I'm talking about!
  • Hmm, after reading this post yesterday, I essentially had nothing to comment about. My email outbox? It contained emails discussing pricing, service requests and product information. Doesn't apply to me, I thought.

    Then today, a short email exchange between Ross and I led to me writing a couple of paragraphs back to him regarding social networking and business use. It then dawned on me: copy/paste/blog! I had done it with out even knowing!

    Now to go copy the text in.....
  • Good point Ben, I guess most of the time I edit my emails before pressing the send button - usually deleting pieces and rearranging it to make more sense. That translates nicely when you copy/paste.
  • Great post Ross,

    But to your last point, I also think we need to ensure that our content is incredibly easy for others to copy / paste for our ideas to be easily spread.

    If I have written or created something that I want people to spread, it needs to comes in bite-sized format that is: a) simple to explain b) short enough to tweet or link to.
  • No of course not Sarah - it's far too easy to LINK to other people's stuff now anyway. It's a bit scary when you can link to an answer to every email on your blog!
  • This is also an efficiency thing - I often use the search function on my email to go back and find things I've said to other people that now apply in different situations and for different people. I'm always amazed that pretty much any question I ask one of my friends (socialentrepreneurship.change.org) he can link me to a blog post about. Not to say he won't apply his response to my own situation, but almost "for further reading check out this post". And it's because he manages to capture conversations in the way you've described here, Ross.

    Just don't take copy and paste to mean copy and paste someone ELSE's work... which is what I first thought this post was about!
  • Dude, excellent post (obviously).

    It's interesting you know but @steve sammartino's comment above makes me hark back to my first 'blog post' a couple of years ago when I was trying to figure out what to write. I remember sending an email to @cama, @melinachan and also yourself and saying something essentiallu like "what do you think of this."

    In the end, that first email became my first post as I took the insights a gleaned from sending the email and the responses and posted then on my blog. Done.

    @Jussi, I think the beauty of this kind of work is that it is highly value add. Think about it - Ross is posting the results of his personal, intimate conversations about how he is going about working on the web in a tone that is scarily similar to the emails we shared. Sharing your secret sauce and conversations that only few are privy to with an audience is absolutely a value add in my book.

    Good work dude, keep it up!
  • Great post - this is essentially what good blogging is about - taking your daily insights and making them public. if i have a good idea from a meeting I just write the word down and =blog next to it. and the entry just writes itself. Other times I do exactly what you say and copy some of the stuff i did that day. Given my blog is about start ups and I run one, so it's a nice fit.

    Recently I had a chat with Michelle Matthews of bar secrets fame on a Friday night while we were nerding it up on Skype - so i just copied it into blog entry and the peeps loved this entry.

    Here it is FYI - http://poprl.com/072H
  • Hey Jussi, yeah I like your thinking but there is something tactile about copy/paste that I really like. It _should_ be fairly mindless, but it is definitely high value-added activity. I think the simplicity is what makes it work because I only generally change a few words here and there and maybe add a photo and then push publish. Done!
  • Hey Ross,

    good article and I really like the concept! I'm not 100% sure about the naming though, "copy-paste" to me generally implies fairly mindless low-value-added activity, which is certainly not the case here.

    Perhaps "applied" or "repurposed" thinking would be more appropriate, what do you reckon?

    Cheers, Jussi
  • That's a cool idea too - so, how do I win a business plan competition? :)
  • I definitely agree though I'm not blogging at the moment. I instead use these longer emails or online conversations as cheat sheets or templates for answering emails asking me for advice.

    After winning a business plan competition last year I keep getting asked about writing a kick ass business plan. Now I can tailor my advice to people who ask with a default template and some questions relevant to their particular business idea.
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