Friday, March 02, 2007

Need Your Help for an Experiment

Note: For various reasons, I have chosen to no longer participate in the experiment explained below. Out of respect for the co-sponsors of the experiment, I am keeping the content of this post as is.


We'd like your participation, if you are willing:

Remember Horton Hears a Who? All the Who's make a noise at the same time, and even though they are small they get heard?

A number of us bloggers want to try an experiment. We want to gather 30,000 bloggers together to shout all at once, and see how loudly we get heard. Why 30,000? Because that is the number of people originally represented by 1 congressional district in the United States. It is a small number when you think of it, but it can have a huge voice.

Here's how it works:

  1. Send an email to brian@bravehumans.com with the subject: Yop!
  2. In the body of the email list the name of your weblog, and the URL.
  3. Your weblog will be added to the list of participating weblogs.
  4. Tell your friends who blog about it, and urge them to send in their weblog as well.
  5. When the list reaches 30,000, a date and a word will be listed on the page. On that date, every weblog on the list agrees to make a single post with the word as the title. The content of the post should be about what you want for the world, whatever that may be. The purpose is not to make a particular political statement, but simply to make a noise. If 30,000 weblogs all post the same unusual word, it WILL be heard.
Have you ever wanted to shout to the world? Here's your chance.

Some of you might be asking, "What if you don't get 30,000 participants?" That's a great question. My perspective is that it proves how difficult it is to communicate with 30,000 people, let alone 570,000 people, which is approximately how many people a congressman represents today. (Yikes! No wonder we don't get heard!)

So, we either prove that 30,000 WILL be heard, or that it's difficult enough to communicate with 30,000 people, which is 19x less than today's congressman needs to communicate with.

And, finally, here's the fine print:
  • Please don't use e-mail to spam people about this; we want this done through the blogosphere by people who want to participate. Feel free to post on it (you can pilfer my text if you'd like), link to this post in your blog, or refer others to this post when you comment on other people's blogs.
  • E-mails sent to the address above will be deleted after being added to the list. The e-mails will neither be collected nor responded to.
We just want to see how loudly 30,000 bloggers can get when they all make a noise at once.

Thanks,
Quipper

14 comments:

Elaine Vigneault said...

This is a fantastic idea! I'm really excited to participate.

Rick said...

Elaine,

Thanks for stopping by. Hope to hear from you again, both here and at BraveHumans.

Thea said...

Terrific idea and fun.
I posted it at http://life-wealth.blogspot.com/ on 5 March and sent the email to Brian.
Namaste, Thea

Anonymous said...

Woderful way to test the power of social media. I am going to join. BTW, would you like to exchange links with me. I like it here. Thanks.

Rick said...

Thea, thanks for stopping by.

Dio, send me your link so I can check it out. Thanks.

We'll be talking - er, commenting - again soon.

Anonymous said...

A great idea, I'll be sending an email soon to sign up.

I am wondering what possibilities lie in everyone putting a link to the page that lists all participating blogs in their post that goes out. 30,000 blogs pointing to a page that points to 30,000 blogs just sounds poetic and balanced for some reason.

Even better, what about having a finalized list as a basic html file that everyone could download and then post into their own blog as a page a day or two before the mass post? I'm sure Digg and Technorati would go haywire if 30,000 blogs all pointed to 30,000 blogs that were all pointed to by 30,000 blogs...with a post of the same title.

Would be interesting, wouldn't it?

Anonymous said...

Hello Quipper,

Just a note to let you know I've posted an article about the project.

I'm happy to be able to participate.

Jose

Susan Helene Gottfried said...

Interesting idea. Let's hope it works!

Rick said...

Sean, Jose and Susan,

Thanks for stopping by...I'm a little behind on my blogging this week.

If it doesn't work, we learn how difficult it is to communicate with and engage 1/19th of a U.S. congressional district's worth of citizens.

Stop back again soon.

Mimi Lenox said...

I'm confused. I get it up to the point of the YOP word.

How do we know what the YOP word will be?

Saikat Sengupta said...

can bloggers from any country participate? i am very much interested. one more thing, will you publish the list of 30000 bloggers anywhere online?

Rick said...

Mimi,

Thanks for stopping by. You can click on the 'participating weblogs' link in my post to see the participating sites. When that page reaches 30,000, Brian will post a word and a date on that page. On the date he lists on the page, we will all write a post with the word in the title.

Saikat,

Certainly, you can participate. We're getting about 50 participants a week. At this rate, we'll reach 30,000 in about twelve years. Anything you can do to help us pick up the pace is greatly appreciated.

Elaine Vigneault said...

One idea might be to pick a topic now and a date later. Then people can prewrite, discuss, learn... before they actually write their piece.

Another idea might be to ask people to post now with a specific post title.

I'm thinking, I'm thinking...

Try to post about it elsewhere whenever you can, like at 2k bloggers ;)

Anonymous said...

I sent an email to Brian, I hope I'm in.
Is his blog down?