Blog and Blogger: Reunited

I woke up this morning, stumbled downstairs and flipped open my laptop. Who was there to greet me but an old—and estranged—friend. As often happens in these scenarios, the conversation quickly took an awkward turn.

Me: "Oh my God! It's blog! Hey there ... it's been, like, soooo long."

Blog: "Yes. Yes it has. I hear you're well. I believe you're at Harvard now?"

Me: "I am, yes ... Look, I've totally been meaning to write. In fact, you probably noticed those posts in the drafts folder? I think I could still turn a few of those ... well, one is especially ... uh"

Blog: Meaningful silence. Blog glares in reply.

Me: Awkward laughter. "Okay, look, I'm sorry. I know that doesn't count. But you don't know what it's been like! The courses here are insanely demanding. I mean, Harvard professors expect you to read, like, a book a day. Every day! Who does that? And then there've been the kids. We had to get them into new schools, and Finn's daycare is in the opposite direction as Annabel's, andnd then there's all these parties—"

Blog: Still glaring. "Parties? You couldn't post to me because of parties!?"

Me: "Well, um. Parties isn't the right word, maybe. I mean, they're at night. And there's alcohol. And food. And, well, we dance sometimes. But mainly we're discussing important things. You know, the future of journalism and whether the New York Times will start charging for content."

Blog: "You had to assemble the finest minds in journalism and ply them with cheap Prosecco to figure out whether or not the Times would do what every J-School freshman already knew they were going to do?"

Me: "Look. You're angry. I'd be pissed too. And I need to be honest with you. I just needed a break, okay? We spent a lot of time together over the last several years, and we always wrote about the same stuff. I've been ... well, I've been studying intellectual history. William James.  John Dewey. Charles Pierce. Pragmatism. And I've also been working on ... short stories."

Blog: Looking baffled. "Oh. Short stories. About crowdsourcing?"

Me: Sighing with exasperation. "No, blog. Not about crowdsourcing. Actually, they're just about people. People, not crowds."

Blog: "I see. You know. You could post them here. I wouldn't mind. And the only people who come by anymore are marketing dorks who punched "crowdsourcing" into Google and wind up here by mistake.

Me: "I guess that's an idea. I could just blog about what I'm doing while I'm on my Nieman? About my classes, and the smart, funny stuff people say? You wouldn't mind?"

Blog: "Mind?! I'd love it. I just, you know, don't like feeling abandoned."

Me: "Ah, Blog, I missed you too. And maybe from time to time we can post about crowdsourcing still."

Blog: Excitedly: "Short stories about crowdsourcing?"

Me: "We'll see, Blog, we'll see."

Comments

[Raphael Gabbarelli]

I have to be honest with you, totally hones: it was a surprise to see my reader.google.com page showing a bold "(1)" near your blog's label!
Anyway, happy to see that you and your blog are still...friends :D

Cheers

P.S.
Me and my blog are just beginning to know each other!!! My crowdsourcing experiment has still to begin ( www.reevolvers.net )

[Chris Dymond]

Hi there!

I'm a marketing dork who punched 'crowdsourcing' into Google!

(Actually, I'm a web innovations dork who punched 'crowd sourced journalism' into google, but your point is fair nonetheless :-)

[Ken Martin]

Jeff, I'm so glad to see you back on your blog. I hope this somewhat cutesy reacquaintance isn't a lark and that you'll start seriously posting again soon.

Reading "Crowdsourcing" changed my life, actually. I've been a print journalist for 29 years and I'm launching a nonprofit hyperlocal website for investigative reporting, The Austin Bulldog. I've use an entire container of Post-it sticky tabs in my copy of the book. Horizontal tabs on the edges of the pages mean it's important to me. Vertical tabs on the tops and bottoms of my pages mark points that absolutely must be incorporated into our website's design.

I started Austin's first online newsletter in July 1999 and in the intervening decade, everything has changed. Thank you for pointing the way toward the future we must all inhabit.

Ken Martin, founder, editor and publisher,
The Austin Bulldog (http:www.theaustinbulldog.org)
An initiative of the Austin Investigative Reporting Project
a 501(c)(3) nonprofit charity

[Dana Elliott MD]

Hi Jeff,

I read your book months ago. Been following your blog since. Good to hear that you will be enlightening us on what is new in crowdsourcing.

Want to share with you on what our non-profit has done with crowdsourcing.

in our efforts to verify known and unknown AED locations, we have collaborated with a non-profit The Extraordinaries (www.beextra.org) to get iPhone users to locate AEDs. You can also view some of the AEDs that were located by iPhone users at www.firstaidcorps.org. ( in the 2nd post ).Remember to follow our org "First Aid Corps" in that app to get access to our missions.

With these data, we created an iPhone app to locate AED locations throughout the world. It is called AED Nearby. You can view the screenshots and a video on it at www.firstaidcorps.org. You can download it for free from the app store.

Rgds
Dana Elliott MD
First Aid Corps

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[The Peoples Story]

Do you think that discipline can be crowdsourced? I was never good at keeping my blogs up to date. Then with all this hype around crowd-sourcing, I thought why not get other people to help me keep my blog up to date. So I created a story blog where I start a story with one sentence then invite others to write the next part of the story by writing a comment. I then attach that comment to the storyline and wo-lah, it grows into a crowd-sourced story. It's more of a social experiment to see how far it goes. I think its cool, because everyone will be able to live vicariously through a character and control his destiny.

Click on this link to write the next line - http://peoplesstory.wordpress.com/the-story-so-far/

[Joey]

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