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“A dream you dream alone is only a dream; a dream you dream together is reality.” — Yoko Ono
Jul
29
Day of Blogs Reflections
Filed Under blogging | Posted by Cara |
For those of you who missed it, on the Day of Blogs we managed to raise a total of $454 for RAINN! As I said over at my Day of Blogs blog, that’s not too shabby for something I decided to do on a whim 5 days in advance, and which I worried would fail miserably.
Thank you to all 18 of the sponsors: Lauren, Ashley, Jessica, Michelle, Erin, Amanda, Dewey and James, Nora, Gaby, Betty, Cassandra, James, Kira, Marcella, LaGuana, Amy, Lindsey and Kristen and Mark. You’re amazing! Thanks also to everyone who stopped by and showed their moral support by reading and commenting — especially Anna who kept me company for hours and endlessly amused me with her Beatles-illiteracy.
I’m waiting for the last echeck to clear, which it hopefully will tomorrow. Then I’ll be transferring the money from PayPal to my account and making a payment to RAINN. Though I’m sure that you all wouldn’t have sent me $450 if you didn’t trust me to donate it rather than spend it on that new car stereo I really want, or on going to see that Yoko Ono art exhibition, it will make me feel better to post a censored screen cap of my receipt for payment to RAINN once it’s all done. So I will.
Now that it’s all over and I’m mostly caught up on sleep, some impressions and lessons below the jump.
First of all, if I chose to do this again for RAINN, I’ll definitely be setting up one of those RAINNmaker pages. The reason that I didn’t in the first place was a rather superficial one — not seeing any way to put a widget directly on the blog — and without factoring fees from those fuckers at PayPal (should have known better). That way the money would go directly to RAINN without the middleman crap, give confidence to those who perhaps were worried that I actually might go buy that car stereo, and be able to make a real donation myself instead of just making up the fees. Note to self: whenever you can leave PayPal out of it, do so!
I noticed that I did things rather differently than most other Day of Blogs bloggers. Most of them, it seemed, either weren’t regular bloggers or mainly had personal blogs — which meant that they could have written about whatever they wanted. Most of those posts were therefore very short. Technically, I could have done the same, but: 1. due to the nature of my blogging, I would have felt like I was playing bait and switch with people 2. I don’t think that I’m capable of writing “short” posts — trust me, I tried and 3. though I love my Beatles blogging, the idea of posting about random stuff for 24 hours quite frankly bores me.
But I definitely do want to do thing differently if there is a next time. Namely, I would want the time to do advance research — I didn’t have that this year due to the fact that I went to D.C. the week before, signed up at the last minute, and was still catching up on stuff I missed while in D.C. when I could have been doing advance stuff for the Day of Blogs. Writing advanced posts and queuing them up is strictly illegal and violates the spirit of the game — so does writing posts in advance and simply hitting the “post” button every 30 minutes.
But I certainly could start posts — and, as I said, research. There were a lot of things that I wanted to write about and didn’t get the chance because 30 minutes in which to write a post is such a short period of time. I wanted to do posts about sexual violence: in lesbian relationships, in prisons and committed against transgender people, people with disabilities, undocumented workers and sex workers, to name a handful. But because I didn’t get to do advance research I had to simply go off of writing about what was in the news — and these types of sexual violence aren’t usually in the news, which is precisely the problem and why I wanted to write about them specifically. I was disappointed in myself for not thinking that one through more.
And of course I also think that doing advanced research and having some posts started would lessen my stress and exhaustion on the day of . . . and therefore might allow me to make it all the way through!
Any other thoughts/suggestions/criticisms from readers? Do you think that it’s something worth doing again — and/or that I would get a similarly strong response?
Some of my favorite posts from the day:
Do You Ask? (seemingly the audience favorite)
Drinking Does Not Equal Consent
Sexual Violence in Entertainment
Tight Jeans No Longer an Excuse For Rape (my personal favorite)
Beatles 101 for Anna (this ultra-condensed, ultra-simplified, history of the Beatles just amuses me personally)
Comments
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“Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.” — Susan B. Anthony
You did an amazing job with the Day of Blogs and I agree, writing about random stuff for 24 hours would have indeed been boring. I really like where you went with it, writing about sexual assault for an organization that aims to help survivors of sexual assault; makes sense. I’m glad that you decided to participate and hopefully next time I find out about it before the day it’s going on, I would have loved to participate.
You just like mocking me.
Right now, my email is full of friends determined to fix this horrible oversite in my education.
Sincerely, though – I’d think outlines of relevant posts, or even just point forms of topics you want to focus on, or a list of links you can draw on would be very helpful.
But I also think putting every other post as something a bit more fun could be helpful to your ability to keep up. Stuff like discussions of your favourite Yoko things, for example.
Anna, while mocking you is indeed mildly amusing, you should be thanking me for getting you on the road to Beatles fandom ;)
I think you did an AMAZING job! As a regular reader of your blog I have to tell you that I think the writing was just as great (and really entertaining), especially poor Anna’s education on the Beatles. I really appreciate all the hard work you did for RAINN – and I’m SURE they are putting the $450+ to good work. They’re lucky to have you on their side :)
[...] Last year, I participated in a little something called the Day of Blogs — a 24 hour blogathon, with a post going up every half hour. As a result of the effort, RAINN received a $454 donation! [...]