The best way to answer this question is of course to read a blog.  In a blog written by Dylan Kissane the science behind reading blogs is explicated:

When it comes to determining what attracts people to blogs the best research has been completed by Professor Barbara Kaye at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. In 2010 she published a peer-reviewed article titled Going to the Blogs: Toward the Development of a Uses and Gratifications Measurement Scale for Blogs in the Atlantic Journal of Communication wherein she outlined the nine reasons that readers seek out information on blogs.

This study, since widely cited in the academic and online discussion of blogs, clearly identified different motivations behind the clicks of blog readers. For the first time blog owners – including businesses – could have a clear understanding of the reasons that people were arriving on their sites and what they were hoping to find when they arrived.

Yet what it did not do was seek to pigeonhole the readers into nine groups. Indeed, some of the reasons that readers arrived on a blog seeking out information were conscious and related to their use of the internet, while others were unconscious and related to the wider lifestyle and life assumptions of the readers. What’s more, some of the reasons were decidedly proximate (having something to do with the specific action of seeking information on a blog this specific time) while others were more general, perhaps defining blogs as a preferred source of information about a subject in comparison with competing media sources.

The Nine Reasons People Read Blogs:

1. Convenient Information Seeking

2. Anti-Traditional Media Sentiment

3. Expression/Affiliation

4. Guidance/Opinion Seeking

5. Blog Ambiance

6. Personal Fulfillment

7. Political Debate

8. Variety of Opinion

9. Specific Inquiry

The question that hit me in a moment of inspiration was is there a new way of blogging that is disruptive?

I think we’re in the middle of a significant shift in the way we engage with information and learn because of technology and that there’s no compelling reason to assume that reading will die, however consumption of content needs to be more compelling.

What I created is called a Sitcom Blog.

A Sitcom Blog has the construct of a sitcom, in blog format. It is designed to read like a sitcom script, feel like a TV sitcom, but look like a blog.

There are some distinct characteristics of a Sitcom Blog that if balanced correctly should be both visually and verbally engaging as the reader reconstructs the scenarios and sequences in their own minds as they read.   

The Sitcom Blog format is used to facilitate reader engagement as they reconstruct the ambiance of each scene internally while reading a familiar sitcom story and plot structure.  As with any sitcom the high level story arch and character discovery and development is manifest through each is episode or in this case a blogisode.  By intent each blogisode is small in plot and copy length. The story arch is designed to be engaging and relevant over the life span of the blogisodes within the series and season.

What is the point?

• Unlike self-help books this will be short to the point and entertaining.
• It serves all the people who do not want or believe in the institutional way of self-help or leadership skills it’s completely situational and immediately applicable.
• Within the Sitcom Blog formula we see examples of the self-help and business best practices, and leadership how to theories, acted out by fictional characters instead of being offered to us in complex theories.

 

This is what’s in it for me:

Publishers are more worried about word count and putting forth a book and a lecture series that is designed to medicate the audience by being entertaining and pseudo enlightening.

And let’s face it not much new has really been invented in self-help, we just re-label things and they all seem to references back to a hand full of common books or research.   Seven Habits for Highly Effective People is a classic book and it’s great, but who has time to read all of that and better yet how can we apply principles  in a very situational way that apply to things that your are experiencing today.  

Within the Sitcom Blog formula of .com Cowboy we see examples of the self-help and business best practices, and how to leadership theories acted out by fictional characters instead of being offered to us in long-form format that attempt to describe complex theories.

To see a complete blogisode look at my launch page and my first blogisode at www.hackingfailure.com under the com Cowboy link.

Please let me know what you think.