A couple of weeks ago plinky.com launched onto the social media landscape.  I guess not surprisingly it came across my desk via Twitter, 2008's social media darling which continues to go from strength to strength. Plinky's something a little different though, it's a blog site, but with a difference.  Each day the team at Plinky post a prompt, a new question or challenge for members to answer and share with each other. Think of it as a conversation starter or in Plinky's words "Inspiration, delivered daily". Today's prompt for example:

Have you gone a day without your cell phone? Isn't it awful? Describe how you you got by (or didn't).

For whatever reason, it's not really my thing.  Perhaps because the prompts are a bit random, or not consistently relevant to me.  I find that I'm not drawn back to the site (even with an email prompt) as regularly as I'm drawn to writing here, or on Twitter. Of course I'm a sample of one, and by all accounts their user base is growing rapidly so it's definitely resonating with at least part of the blogosphere.  And what Plinky did do for me was provide a possible answer to a client problem. A local government client of ours regularly seeks public submissions on all manner of issues.  However the formal submission process seems only to be used by the same group of people and while submission quality is high, volume is low and they're not hearing from all the key parts of the community. So we thought we might try micro-submissions initiated by conversation starters.  The idea being that regular topical questions are posted to the site which the community can then respond to.  No ground breaking use of technology here, we've just realised that writer's block isn't limited to tortured poets.  And that for some, a blank sheet of paper is more of a closed door than a warm invitation. Thanks Plinky!