I cheated and posted over at TeenyManolo, so what are you waiting for? CLICK!!!
While you’re at it, you can still donate to the Blogathoning efforts of one raincoaster; all donations go directly to support the Federation of BC Writers, and not one thin dime goes to buy me any gin. Although if you drop by with a decanter, I wouldn’t turn you away.
There’s nothing like a secret weapon. In an event as cut-throat as Blogathon, you’d be a fool to throw your hat into the ring unless there were the equivalent of a nuclear bomb up your sleeve. Or something. Where’s that “complete invalidly nested metaphors” button???
Anyhoodle, Blogathon is nothing to take lightly, particularly when one has taken the rebel stance right out of the box.
Apparently sleep deprivation causes me to wax metaphorical, badly. And I’m supposed to keep this up for 24 hours? Hmmm, this is gonna take more gin.
Where was I? Yes, about to mention my secret weapon. Since writing posts ahead and setting them to autopost is against the rules, and since I wasn’t organized enough to line up sixteen guest posters so I could grab some z’s (known, in Canuckistan, as zeds, yes, that’s right, we even SNORE BETTER than you people) I’m going to have to stay up and come up with 48 different ideas. This might as well be called Blog Filler Day, for I see a visit or two to Blogthings in my future when I read my Palm.
See what I did there?
How am I gonna come up with 48 different ideas off the top of my head? I’m not. If I were to take the ideas off the top of my head, the titles of my posts would go something like this:
What I am going to do is trawl through my Tumblr.
Dedicated raincoaster fans (both of you) will recall that over on our Terribly Serious social media and community events blog we examined the New York Media phenomenon which is Tumblr, and we actually found a use for the damn thing ( perhaps the first use ever found for anything coming out of that NYC circle jerk): it’s the best scrapbooking service in the world.
That may not sound like much, but it’s huge. We all have things we’d like to get back to sometime, just not right now. If you’re on the web and you use the Share on Tumblr button that Tumblr provides as a Firefox add-on, you can instantly bookmark the site you’re looking at, adding comments if you wish. Over time, your tumblr becomes a repository of notes on a particular theme or group of themes, adding an additional dimension to your online presence. Academics may use this to bookmark papers, entertainers to bookmark venues or gigs, bloggers to corral blog fodder for future reuse.
While there are many existing bookmarking services, del.icio.us being the best-known, Tumblr’s great advantage is its accessibility, both in terms of reading and writing. A Tumblr is itself a kind of blog, and so it makes sense to the reader as a web browsing experience in and of itself, which other bookmarking sites do not.
So for the past several months, instead of keeping a text file called “shit to blog” I’ve kept a Tumblr with all of that in there. It’s currently sitting at nearly 500 entries, so I’m stocked for quite a few of these little turns around the blog. They are not in any sort of order, nor are they on any particular topic, so yeah, you shouldn’t really notice any difference whatsoever.
Did I mention that on Twitter I’ve talked two rival gin houses into shipping me “care packages?” Now if only it worked as well with men! All the ones that volunteer to give me their packages are ones I wouldn’t care to have, so it seems. But that’s neither here nor there; it is, in fact, nowheresville.
Anyhoodle…
This Saturday (because I am insane) from 6am I’ll be participating in Blogathon 2009, a 24-hour, 48 blog post postathon, to raise money for the Federation of BC Writers, BC’s home grown support system for Left Coast literati, of which I used to be the Lower Mainland representative, back when I had (what do you call that…that thing…where you can do stuff…) TIME! Oh yeah, and if I sleep in (likely) I’m gonna hafta do a post every ten minutes or so until, like, noon. That could get a little crazy.
What are you waiting for, now that this fabulous news has broken? Reach deep into your heart and your wallet (or your neighbor’s; God knows, I’m not fussy). Sign up to sponsor me by selecting “raincoaster.com” from the list of available blogs. Clicky, clicky! You can sponsor me X amount per post or a lump sum for the entire 24 hour slogathon. For a $50 donation, I’ll make an ego-gratifying post entirely about you, You, YOU, and will even include a link to your Facebook Fan Page (if you insist).
If you want to watch this madness live, you can come on down to Workspace at 21 Water Street in Gastown, where the blogerati of Vangroover will be holed up, typing (or napping) away. Vancouver’s own Mojave band will serenade us with a private concert, and April Smith of AHA Media will be taking video (gee, is 6am too early to get my makeup done?), so you need not feel left out.
A word of warning: I will get my 48 posts up, but I will NOT get them up promptly every goddam half-hour. I AM NOT A BLOODY MACHINE and I am also not cheating by pre-posting and scheduling things, tempting though it may be. I may or may not attend Illuminares and liveblog it; depends if I can catch a ride to and fro; forty minutes on the bus each way is a killer. On the other hand, Miss 604 is judging a bartending contest in the middle of everything, so if she can do that, perhaps I can do this (who wants to be my DD?).
After Blogathon wraps, the procedure is simple: you just tote up your donation and send the cheque straight to the Fed, which will put it to good use on behalf of British Columbia’s home-grown literary talent. And, hopefully, buy me a drink. I’m gonna need one if that gin doesn’t get here on time.
Well, it’s been far too long since we’ve taken a stroll down Self-Referential Road on the ol’ raincoaster blog, but that situation is about to be rectified. For lo, in addition to having broken into Vangroover’s Social Media Elite for Sale Or Rent (aka Will Tweet for Access) and been asked to some pretty damn-fine swankaliciously exciting events, including some I can’t tell you about yet (for lo, it would endanger my access to the open bar, and since I’m on a liquid fast that could be catastrophic and I know you wouldn’t want that to happen, right? right) and the recently blogged Capones and Bombay Sapphire events.
And as I’ve gotten on the radar for invitations, so I’ve also scrambled and clawed my way onto the radar for interviews, which come with much greater exposure, if far less gin. I’m gonna hafta do something about that: social mediaistas, are you with me? I say we get together and talk about going on strike over a few drinks and then forget all about the movement, as usual.
Anyhoohow/whatever, Kontent Creative just up and emailed me and interviewed me that way. This will sound familiar to some people. Unlike on previous occasions, I actually got back to them relatively promptly and, thus, they put it up promptly as well. Kontent Creative has a snazzy angle: each interview is just five questions, obviously designed to appeal to limited attention spans of the Twitterati. So there goes your barrier to entry.
Click and learn five things about raincoaster which oft were thought, but ne’er so well expressed. If I do say so myself.
a snippet of Kontact Creative’s 5 Questions with the Tentacled One:
2) What is your favourite online resource?
It’s a tie between Fark and The Guardian. The day is not complete until I’ve checked both of them, and on certain days it’s quite difficult to tell them apart, really. Except Fark would never let Polly Toynbee near a keyboard.
“Represent! with Moveable Type” eh? Yeah, how can we tell this was done in 2006. “Typepad hollaback!”
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raincoaster 