Dorothy Crenshaw June 5, 2009 | 11:56:43
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A Blog About Nothing

It had to happen. With so many ways of sharing content, from blogs and feeds, to social networks, from pings to posts to tweets, someone had to do it.

Finally, a site for people who have a million ways to share content, but nothing much to say.  At least, that’s how Plinky bills itself. “Inspiration, delivered daily,” it promises.  (Actually, I prefer the earlier, gentler tag line, “Because sometimes you need a push.”) It’s been called “the answer to blogger’s block.” When I first ran across Plinky on mashable.com, I didn’t think much about it, possibly because I had yet to experience a deficit of topics that interest me.  When I came across it again recently, in Rob Walker’s popular “Consumed” column in The New York Times Magazine, I instantly wanted to blog about it. There’s an irresistible meta quality to the whole thing…a blog about nothing to blog about.  What could be better?

It turns out Plinky could be a lot better, at least for me. The promise is appealing, but the execution seems muddled.  Plinky offers “prompts” that pose queries, some of which are pretty random (“Who would win in a fight between a wolverine and a Tasmanian Devil?), while others are more intuitive, but bland (“What movies could you watch over and over again?”)  The idea seems to be to offer varied bits of content, and to start a conversation, and you can export your “plinks” to your Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, or other platforms.

Nice idea, but one problem is that neither the prompts nor the responses I read were interesting, let alone blogworthy.  You can create your own prompt, but that seems to defeat the purpose, and unless you start a real brushfire, what’s the point?

Plinky is part social network, part Internet parlor game, part blog tool, but it ends up being none of the above.  There are other sites, like the question site Fluther, and the content-sharing site ThisMoment, that foster the interaction in a more entertaining and effortless way.  Neither is a publishing tool, however.

So, even after my experiment with Plinky, I still have nothing to blog about today. Nothing.