Hey folks, the wrap up is now online where the homepage used to be - http://blogactionday.org - take a look, there’s plenty of interesting stats, quotes, posts, links and more. Of course it’s only a tiny fraction of what happened, but fascinating nonetheless.
Also we have a winner for our guess-how-many-participants competition, and it is Aparecido Jose do Rosario of http://crazyseawolf.blogspot.com, congratulations!! I’ve just sent off an email so we can sort out the prize, the competition was incredibly close with the runner up being just 6 minutes over the deadline.
Anyhow I’ll update this blog one or two more times over the next year, but most likely the next time you’ll hear from me is in 2008. Until then thank you all so much for being a part of Blog Action Day. It would not have been possible without the thousands of bloggers out there who made this event what it was - a mammoth success!
Thank you!
Well it’s the last few hours of the inaugural Blog Action Day, as I write this it’s 9:30pm in Honolulu and soon the last countries will have ticked over to October 16th.
It’s been an amazing day and I think we as bloggers can really say we shook up the internet. During the final day the blog participation count shot up and it’s just 50 shy of a whopping 20,000 bloggers. With 2.5 hrs left, you never know a few late stragglers may still register which would make for a nice final tally.
Tomorrow I will be switching the site over to a post-Blog Action Day wrap up site which will highlight some of the amazing achievements of the day, so you can look forward to seeing that. I’ll be sending out an email to everyone as well to say thank you and sign off for 2007.
And then I shall go and sleep for a very, very long time!
We’re about half way through the day now (taking the many time zones into account) and the blog posts are pouring out. From Google’s Blog Search I can see that there have been close to 5,000 blogs that have been indexed which have the words “Blog Action Day” in the post during the last 24 hours, and no doubt plenty more still on their way as we head into European and American daylight and evening hours.
The best way to see what a huge impact we’re making is thanks to BlogPulse a service which measures trends around the blogosphere. Here is a graph for the words Blog Action Day and the phrase “Blog Action Day” appearing:
I’m looking forward to seeing how that graph ends tomorrow, that’s for sure!
As I click around some of my favourite sites I’m starting to see more and more Blog Action Day posts appearing, there are some great articles, pledges to donate earnings, and in the case of one of my favourite blogs onStartUps, Dharmesh the blogger there is donating his entire year’s earnings to charity!
Along with Dharmesh, here are a few of my favourite posts from around the web:
and there’s plenty, plenty, plenty more! I didn’t realise it but I can see I’m going to be wasting many hours today clicking around the web just reading all these fantastic articles! Long Live Blogging!
We’re starting to see articles appearing in some big media publications today about Blog Action Day. My favourite so far is from the Star Tribune in Minneapolis which is fantastic, here’s a quote from the piece given by Nora Paul, director of the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota:
“It’s about solidarity,” he said. “If I didn’t sign up, who would take my place? An effort like this can’t be successful if I don’t do my part to make it successful. And if one person out there reads an article today that makes them think twice before they throw their cigarette butt on the ground, then my part mattered.”
Another great article is in the American Chronicle written by Kevin Stirz, here’s an excerpt:
The power here is in diversity, passion and energy.
Most bloggers write because they want to, not as a job. That implies a passion that might not exist for someone who writes for money. And, most bloggers are not trained as reporters or journalists. (In fact, we’re often criticized for that.) So, bloggers offer a different background than journalists would.
And, most bloggers participating in Blog Action Day are not environmental activists or writers. So, again, we’ll bring a different perspective to the discussion of how to protect our environment better.
Blog Action Day is important because it shows us the power, energy and diversity of many people to voluntarily propose ideas and start conversations about an important topic. It should add great value to the current conversations about how to protect our environment.
Cyan is giving interviews today to Skai Television in Greece, Rem.fm in Europe and others. If you have a media enquiry please email her!
Well I have just published the first of a few posts I am writing for various blogs today, it’s over at NorthxEast and is the ‘how-it-all-happened’ post which explains how we started the initiative, where the idea came from, the strategies we used to get the ball rolling and what we hope it’ll achieve. It’s a bit of a long post, but I hope people enjoy it and get something out of it for their own ideas. It’s called Building Momentum: How Blog Action Day Got Going and if you like digging things, Give it a Digg!
Happy Blogging Folks!
And so we come to it at last… Blog Action Day has now officially begun for the first countries closest to the International Dateline.
I am about to send out an email to the 14,000+ bloggers who have registered. We’ll be leaving registrations open for all the latecomers during the day so we may reach a still higher number.
For myself over here in Sydney there is still one hour before the clock ticks over to October 15th and I still have a bit of sleeping to do before it’s time to post. I think as the day progresses on we can expect the posts to build up in volume from a trickle to an ocean.
And one last reminder, don’t forget that if you can it would be great if you could either tag your posts with the words “Blog Action Day” or simply use those three words somewhere in your post as we will be measuring how many times the phrase appears in the blogosphere today.
I’ll post again later today on the Action Blog and we’ll have a special recap of the day and what we’ve achieved up at www.blogactionday.org in two days time with statistics, news and more.
Have a great Blog Action Day!!
Collis on behalf of
The Blog Action Day Team
Today while going through the increasingly long queues of blogs who have committed to participating on Blog Action Day I came to a series of blogs bearing a name that you and I and just about everyone with a computer is familiar with. Today over a dozen of Google’s blogs including the mighty Official Google Blog and the hugely popular YouTube Blog joined Blog Action Day. With them they bring a combined RSS readership of well over a million internet users further swelling the ranks of this initiative.
And if you thought Google was the only company who’d be writing for the environment this Monday, then you may want to think again. From blog networks, to media blogs to even the blogs of American banking corporation Wells Fargo, it seems that ordinary bloggers like you and I are shoulder to shoulder with companies who believe in creating a better world. And call me an optimist or an idealist or anything in between, but I think that’s pretty cool.
As the Blog Action Day storm builds and our number passes 12,000 as I write this, along comes some extraordinary news. Stavros Dimas, the European Union’s Environmental Commissioner has announced he will hold a special internet chat for the day. The Financial Mirror reports:
The chat will take place between 1400 and 1700 on the Commissioner’s blog site and will be conducted in English, French, German and Greek.
Commissioner Dimas said: “International Blog Action Day is an excellent initiative that will help to raise public awareness of the serious environmental challenges we face and to involve citizens in Europe and the rest of the world in contributing to solutions. This is also the aim of my blog. I look forward to a lively internet chat with a large number of participants.”
This is fantastic news and just shows the traction that Blog Action Day is getting around the world.
If you are a Digg user please feel free to vote up the Financial Mirror’s story by clicking here
With just days left to go, the momentum behind Blog Action Day has been really building. Emails are flooding in, press requests, messages of support, new blogs joining in and more. It’s also great to hear that four more top 100 blogs have gotten involved and will be posting up on Monday. Mashable and Read/WriteWeb are two giants of their genres both holding audiences in the hundreds of thousands, TreeHugger is far and away the leading environmental blog and John Chow is something of a legend amongst bloggers. So it’s very exciting to know that these four join a growing number of A-listers to be throwing their lot in with all the rest of us!
With so much happening, I can’t wait to see what each new day’s worth of email is going to bring!
