30,000
Recently Ann Coulter called John Edwards a faggot while addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference. Several prominent conservatives were in the audience, including Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney.
It’s Coulter, it’s offensive, and it’s not surprising.
It’s also not the point of my post today.
I mention the incident because it was brought to my attention through an e-mail from the Edwards campaign. (Honesty side-note: I’m not a Democrat, and I’m on the mailing list of several candidates of various persuasions.) They mentioned the incident, linked to the video clip, and then rallied the troops with this:
This is just a taste of the filth that the right-wing machine is gearing up to throw at us. And now that it’s begun, we have a choice: Do we sit back, or do we fight back?
I say we fight. Help us raise $100,000 in “Coulter Cash” this week to show every would-be Republican mouthpiece that their bigoted attacks will not intimidate this campaign.
And then I got really offended. What outraged me was not that they asked for money, but that they only asked for money. The Edwards campaign could have asked people to write Romney and ask whether he agrees with Coulter and accepts her support. They could have urged people to contact the CPAC and urge them to ensure Coulter isn’t invited to speak anymore. Instead, they simply said send us money. Don’t get involved. Let us handle it.
In the grand scheme of things, $100,000 is chump change. But for a Presidential hopeful even chump change is more valuable than, say, 30,000 bloggers. Apparently for all our efforts and discussions, BraveHumans and every other weblog on the planet isn’t worth the price of Starbuck’s coffee. Their attitude ticks me off, and yet I wonder if they might be right.
Which brings me to the real point of this post.
Rick at QuipSpot, Carol at My View of It and I have decided to try a little experiment. We want to see if we can gather 30,000 bloggers to act as a single voice for one moment in time. We want to see if such a thing is possible, and if so just how loud we can get. Think Horton Hears a Who.
Here is the proposal from Rick’s site:
Here’s how it works:
- Send an email to brian@bravehumans.com with the subject: Yop!
- In the body of the email list the name of your weblog, and the URL.
- Your weblog will be added to the list of participating weblogs.
- Tell your friends who blog about it, and urge them to send in their weblog as well.
- 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.
Yes, I am asking for 30,000 e-mails. I will be checking that each site submitted is actually a weblog, and I will be adding the sites to the list by hand. I realize this is a profoundly crazy idea. I’m willing to put a great deal of effort into this because I truly want to see if such a thing is possible. If we succeed we will have demonstrated the profound power of grassroots blogging. If we fail then we will have demonstrated that blogging is still largely reactionary and driven from the top down. As the Edwards campaign demonstrates, politicians still fundamentally believe the latter. I would very much like to prove it is the former.
The 30,000 number was chosen because it represents the original number of citizens in a congressional district. On one hand it seems like such a large number. You may have heard about the 2000 bloggers website. We are looking for 15x that number. On the other hand, 30,000 is quite a small number. It represents about 1/20th of a modern congressional district. It is the tiniest fraction of the more than 57 million weblogs currently tracked by Technorati.
As I post this 10 bloggers have already signed on to this idea. I’m sure for a few of you reading this, I had you at Yop!
What about the rest of you? Why should you participate? Why should you get excited about this, write about this on your blog, and tell your MySpace friends or everyone in your MyBlogLog community?
I don’t know. I’ve told you why I want to do this. Rick and Carol have stated their reasons on their websites. Find your own reasons. What would you tell the world if you had the voice of 30,000 bloggers? What would you like it to achieve? The worst that can happen is we never reach 30,000. The best that can happen is we change the world.
Which outcome would you like?
March 4th, 2007 11:29
30,000 is a HUGE number but I have faith we bloggers can unite in this one task this one time. Let the project begin!
I’ve already posted about this in my own blog and I’m posting it in http://www.2kbloggers.com tomorrow.
Great idea!
March 4th, 2007 16:06
YOP!
Nice, clean, purposeful concept - count me in!
Thanks!
WrightHandBlogger
March 4th, 2007 16:59
Brian,
Great post, and thanks for the hat tip.
Rick
March 4th, 2007 19:31
Great idea and fun too. I’ve posted it at http://life-wealth.blogspot.com/ on 5 March and sent you my email.
Namaste, Thea
March 4th, 2007 19:43
I’m in! Watch for my email!
Thanks Brian!
March 4th, 2007 20:59
count me in. i hope you are not inviting leona helmsley, I mean ann “mansadamsapple” coulter to also participate.
March 4th, 2007 21:15
Now sauerkraut, be nice. If we don’t want Ann to name-call, we should behave as well, hard as it may be.
And send me an email to get on the list. I don’t want to have to toggle between comments and emails if this really takes off.
Brian
March 5th, 2007 02:29
This is a great excercise. Count me in.
March 5th, 2007 09:42
I’m in, what a marvelous idea. Stuff like this gets me excited. Bloggers have a huge voice on the net and I think we can really accomplish something with this.
March 5th, 2007 09:59
Dio,
Welcome to BraveHumans. If you want on the list, just send me an email.
Brian
March 5th, 2007 10:46
One voice, very cool idea. E-mail is on it’s way. I just got done writing a post about feedom of speech. Good timing.
March 5th, 2007 13:27
I would be a LOT more behind this if the stated goal was to speak to the governing wonks that we won’t be toyed with or sold to the lobbyists, or something like that. Something that said “We are HERE *and* we’re TALKING to each other, and you better listen up!”
But 30,000 posts of “what you want for the world?” Good grief! What an aimless, disorganized objective. Making noise is cool. Making the *same* sound together is much more powerful event. It can communicate.
Even better would be for discussions on BH to come to a consensus and then the summary of said consensus would be posted by all 30,000 bloggers!
THAT would be impressive!
It’s true that we may not come to a consensus, but if the 30,000 posted that “Hey, we’ve been talking about Issue XYZ” at BH,” that could still open eyes and ears.
My thoughts.
March 5th, 2007 14:02
Scott,
You make an excellent point. 30,000 blogs shouting at once will simply make a noise. But I suspect the noise will be huge, because no one has EVER gathered this many bloggers at once. If this works, it will hit the major media, and show them that there is a power to the blogosphere they have yet to fully understand. That is the only message it will send, but it is also just the first message.
You are right, simultaneous posts on the same topic is one way to communicate. There are lots of others I can think of, but for now I would like to see if this can even work in its simplest form. If it can’t then all the other ideas I have are moot.
As for a discussion forum, I would be happy to open a forum to talk about what messages people want to convey. My only concern is that forums are notorious for degrading into name-calling. It would need people to help guide things and set the tone.
Brian
March 6th, 2007 02:48
Superb idea - the reaction of the mainstream media will be very interesting. This could really be an example of the idea that a single voice can be powerful when combined with others. Good luck!
March 8th, 2007 10:06
It will be interesting to watch what type of response comes from this huge project. I posted it to my main blog just moments ago and will spread the word through various other means too:
http://thearticlewriter.com/blog/2007/03/08/lets-try-30000-bloggers/
March 12th, 2007 20:56
[…] from Brave Humans, Carol from My View Of It and Rick from QuipSpot - Drive By Blogging began this experiment to […]
March 12th, 2007 22:25
Hello Brian,
Thanks for signing me up for the 30,000 Blogger project. If you have not already seen it, I’ve posted an article about the project on my blog. I’m looking forward to the day when you post the 30,000th blog.
Jose
March 13th, 2007 00:02
I signed up over the weekend and posted about it on my blog too.
And I think the best chance to get 30,000 is not to have a specific message. But, there is an implied message here–that together 30,000 bloggers can be heard.
Maybe someone can make some kind of logo for putting in a side bar. Then it could link to your 30,000 posts site.
Good luck.
March 13th, 2007 21:42
I’ve sent off my Yop! email to Brian. I’ve also added a post on the Electronic Village about this endeavor.
http://electronicvillage.blogspot.com/
peace,
Villager
March 19th, 2007 22:07
[…] to act as one voice for a moment in time. If you read this site and have a blog, hop on over to here and sign up for this little (Huge) experiment. If we can pull it off it should be very interesting […]
March 27th, 2007 17:31
I can’t find how to email you to join the 30K. Do I need to register with the site or what? I’m really interested in this and you guys have come up with a great way to really get a message sent out to the world.
March 27th, 2007 17:32
Oh my gosh I totally blanked out that your email address is in the message. Sorry!!
March 28th, 2007 11:22
[…] Brian @ Brave Humans, on 30,000 […]