Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: Freshening Up Content

Iphigene, Fats, and I had a quickie exchange through Facebook about what we’re going to include here for this mini-challenge called Ways to Freshen Up Your Content as hosted by Emily’s Reading Room. This has been on our minds recently and we have been brainstorming on ways through which we can add on to our site. I just feel very fortunate that I’m working with a bunch of really creative ladies who always have bright new ideas.

So far, we do have several existing features here, and they’re pretty active too. We have the following:

We try to post a book review written by a child/teenager at least once a month here in GatheringBooks. We feel that their voices are important and should definitely be heard and valued.

We post our interviews with authors and illustrators in “Behind the Books.”

We invite academics/teachers/educators to share their views about our bimonthly themes or books that moved them in Academic Nook.

We also do occasional interviews with Poets who moved us into thinking and feeling through their verse in Poet’s Sanctum.

This is all in addition to our existing bimonthly themes. Our current one is Girl Power and Women’s Wiles which is ongoing until the first week of May.

New Stuff to be Unwrapped Soon

1. Myra: Inspired by TBM’s 50 Year Project and Travel Photos, we would also be adding a Photo Journal section here in GatheringBooks to be launched this week. We’re pretty excited about that one since most of us are also deeply into photography. The only thing missing right now is our lovely widget (Iphigene..ehem ehem, cough cough ehem Iphigene ehem ehem).
2. Myra: We would also be including an Arts Corner where we shall post about museum exhibits, gallery openings, upcoming concerts/plays, book-related events/fairs that we are particularly interested in. I think it’s cool that we’re also coming from three different countries (Singapore for me, San Diego for Fats, and Manila for Iphigene) – so it’d be good to capitalize on this as well. Covers more ground, so to speak.
3. Myra: I am also hoping to add more posts connected to the conferences I will be attending this year, namely: Asian Festival of Children’s Content here in Singapore, the Children’s Literature Association 2012 ‘Literary Slipstreams Conference’ in Boston, and the Narrative Inquiry in Music Education Conference to be held in Finland.
4. Myra: I am hoping that I get to write more reflective (yet short and sweet) posts about lines from books that moved me or take photos of quotes that caught my eye.
5. Iphigene: Include more posts related to adult/general fiction and not just picture books or YA novels.
6. Iphigene: Invite more ‘guest bloggers’ to our site.
7. Iphigene: More active participation by other members of GatheringBooks when it comes to writing book reviews (e.g. Iphigene has been quite busy lately, so she has not reviewed as many books as she would like)
8. Fats: Discover a way through which readers can be led to our previous posts related to the current one we have just published (e.g. a prompt at the end of the post which goes ‘If you like this post, you might want to visit the following’)
9. Fats: Have a niftier page where people can be led to our other social networking sites with just one click, complete with cutie widgets (e.g. Goodreads, Pinterest, BookBlogs, Shelfari)
10. Iphigene, Fats, Myra: Visit more blogs and gain new friends this year.

Whew! That’s about it! How about you? Have you joined this mini-challenge too? Please leave a link in our comments section so we’d be sure to visit yours too. We’d love to know some of the ideas that you came up with. 🙂