I’ve been blogging more frequently over the past few months. I find it’s a great way to refine and practice articulating my thoughts. But (tbh) I also blog out of vanity. Most bloggers get a high off of appreciation. The number of likes, tweets, upvotes, etc. means something and that’s why you see share buttons beside nearly ever post.
I created REQUOTE as an experiment for myself, to encourage my readers to share my writing and provide them with an easy way to share quotable content. You can see an example of how I’ve used it on my blog here.
The inspiration came from a few trends and behaviors I noticed:
Bloggers often highlight key quotes - Joel Gascoigne, and several other bloggers, often bold key points in their posts to improve readability and (I believe) provide readers an implicit call-to-action to share their writing.
Tapestry’s inline sharing call-to-action - Tapestry, a new platform reinventing story-telling, presents a subtle Twitter bird below notable quotes (example). Simply tap the bird to tweet.
Branch re-thinks positive feedback - Branch recently opened to the public, adding the ability for readers to highlight and share specific user quotes.
Markerly enables micro-content sharing - add Markely with a few lines of code to your blog and readers can share elements (text, video, photos) in a page with a few clicks.
My own behavior - I read several blogs and often quote pieces of the article that I share on Twitter.
I enjoyed whipping this together (thanks Koes and Andrew for the help with jquery!) and won’t be offended if no one else cares. At the very least, I found one user. :)
Please visit REQUOTE.it and if you have any feedback or suggestions, send them my way!
I love this Ryan Hoover, I noticed it on your blog and I think it's very cool. As an insight, on my own blog I notice that the points I make bold are often Tweeted by people (even without it being as easy as you've made it with REQUITE.it) so it's a great idea to take it that step further and make it easier to do something people are already doing (i.e. it's already validated that it's a good product in some ways).
I wonder if you could also provide analytics of how many share the bold points?
Good idea. This would be very useful data for myself and users.
I've considered using bit.ly, awe.sm, or a similar URL shortener to track shares and clicks. Like buff.ly, it would also serve as a good way to brand REQUOTE (e.g. "rqut.it").