Introducing: The Community Pool

One of the things we’ve been excited to see develop here at The Daily Post is your engagement with one another in the comments — offering feedback, ideas, and support. We thought it would be valuable to carve out a space here for those of you looking for input on your work, so today we’re introducing the Community Pool.

All About You: Key Survey Findings

Hundreds of you took the time to fill out our survey (thanks!), and we’ve been combing through the results all weekend. As we’d hoped, we got some really helpful feedback that will allow us to tweak The Daily Post in ways that will make it more useful for you.

Interested in what your fellow bloggers think? Here are some of the key findings:

Ten Questions to Help Us Improve The Daily Post

As some of you have already noticed, we’re starting to shake things up a little around here and experimenting with new features, like Weekly Writing Challenges and Freshly Pressed analyses.

(Before you panic: Don’t worry, the Weekly Photo Challenge isn’t going anywhere.)

We don’t want to go too nutty without knowing that whatever we add to the site will be useful to you in reaching your blogging goals – and we could use a little help there.

We’d appreciate it if you could spend a few minutes taking a simple, ten question survey to give us a snapshot of your blogging habits and goals, favorite Daily Post features, and the types of new content you’d be interested in – along with anything else you feel like telling us about The Daily Post.

We’re here to support you, so your feedback means a lot to us and will drive the future of The Daily Post. Take the survey now!

A Year in Posting

As the year comes to a close, it’s hard to not take a look back at what we’ve accomplished, individually and collectively, in the past twelve months. The internet and online communities are a constantly changing source of inspiration: Occupy Wall Street caused a 217% increase in mobile sharing; GigaOM recently published an article on how eReaders and self-publishing are changing the landscape of journalism; and WordPress even covered some of the top news stories that were written up by the amazing bloggers on WordPress.com.

As the writing, social media, and blogging landscape changes, I’m sure your methods and goals for blogging have changed as well. The Daily Post started with the idea of helping bloggers to post daily or weekly and get past any hurdles that may prevent you from hitting “Publish.”

When you do something once a day, or once a week, your skills improve dramatically. I recently came across this Kickstarter project from a fellow who started making an illustration a day and is now on his 1000th drawing. What new skills have you developed as a Daily Post participant?

Next year, inviting contributors to post on your blog or conducting an interview with a fellow blogger, local entrepreneur, or even a friend with a neat project is a great way to bring new audiences to your blog. You may also consider publishing some of your blog posts as a book. (Don’t forget, you’re in great company!) There’s lots of new themes available in our Theme Showcase, how about a fresh look for you blog to get you excited for the new year?

Another fun way to take a look at your growth this year is to post a recap. There are plenty of articles on the end of the year blog posts. Some of my favorites are writing about your best posts of 2011, which posts you feel didn’t get enough appreciation, and what you learned in the past year.

I’d love to hear in the comments what might have prevented you from blogging as often as you could have or any tips you’re looking forward to learning for next year. That’s what we’re here to help with!

What do you think of the new posting UI?

Since many of you post on WordPress.com every day, you likely noticed we changed what happens when you hit the publish button.

It now looks something like this:

You can read more about the specific changes we made, and why, in the announcement post.

However, I’m posting here on DailyPost as this feature was, in part, designed with you in mind. We wanted to give frequent posters a better sense of their possible goals, and give feedback on how you’re doing. We also want people who post less often than you do, to be motivated and inspired to be more like you.

Currently the progress bar simply resets every 5 posts. But we’d like to make this more interesting and are already exploring design ideas. We’d like to give you more data about how you have blogged in the past, and help you use that to be more successful in the future.

If you have suggestions for how this feature can better track your progress, or motivate you to come back and post again soon, leave a comment.