Who I’m inspired by right now is Matt Webb, because he identified earlier this year that he was not blogging, and therefore writing, as much as he wanted to, and he’s been going whole-hog on changing that since then. I don’t always get to his posts in a timely fashion, but between the Kindle, the iPhone, and the Google Reader, some of my best weekend afternoons are spent catching up.

I’ve endeavoured to feel safe to speak in my own space of this blog; up until this point I have failed. I have lamented the naivete of some of the posts I’ve written here. I’ve been nervous that speaking with my true voice has cost my job opportunities with people and groups doing work I’d really like to help with. I’ve also become scared to the core that my blogging voice has infected and irreversibly damaged whatever it is I use for my academic writing, leaving the latter soaked under hailstorms of red ink from my profs, ever generous in their feedback to help me do better (and upholding the standards befitting a master’s program).

There was a dark period of time where all I could see, in fact, were people being nice to me with an agenda in their hands, intending to make off with my ideas and asking me for help with their well-funded projects, even as I was finding it challenging it just to scrape rent together, and despairing that this would always be the case. That road is still possible — either that I become that jaded and focused only on loss, or that I leave my economic sustainability completely vulnerable that way in some well-placed but misguided desire to generous.

Watching Sarah Kay’s TED Talk this morning has been a revelation. Most of all, it reminded me that I do know things, and that it might even be less important to be right than to understand the deeper insights that come from being wrong.

That’s what I need this blog to be, more than anything else — not just a showcase of me trying and succeeding, but a home to the painstaking process of unpacking those times I tried and failed. That’s the place where the craft matures. Or at least it is for me — even if others find it completely easy and are capable of having things spring forth fully-formed from their mind, that’s not where I am, and that’s a fact, not a problem.

If I’m cursed to be Canada’s Sarah Baskerville, the blogger in the UK who had her blog and Twitter dissected by the Daily Mail and painted as a loose cannon and a problem for the government — maybe that’s better than the cowering in the corner afraid to speak, as I sometimes feel I am now (save for the few other places I’m given permission. Like this mostly-mine post on wayfinding kiosks at the Vancouver Public Space Network I banged out on a whim last week. Personally satisfying (and, OK, a little indulgent) and prompted some great questions.

This is not solved yet and, for all I know, might never be; but this post stands here as a commitment to continue working to get this solved both personally and with any organization I give my time to; to find others who have figured it out; and maybe even to share any answers I get.

When I ask myself what 24 straight hours of blogging looks like, admittedly, my immediate vision is somewhat grim: I see myself hunched over the laptop keyboard, twitchy from being overcaffienated, bags under my eyes. The words are starting to blur and the impetus to publish takes precedent over quality, coherence, and relevance.

As the aphorism goes, the wise learn from others’ mistakes, and the foolish learn from their own. I’ve had my fair share of being foolish, but when it comes to Blogathon, I am determined to take all the cues I can from the countless others who have done this in previous years, like Raul and Rebecca.

That said, blogging has also changed, particularly in the past few months. Social networking (Facebook) and microblogging (Twitter) have altered the broader context of the online world in which bloggers publish. Who cares if you write a blog post once every half-hour, when the most avid users of Twitter are sending tweets once every 5 minutes – or more? I haven’t gotten a blog trackback in months, for that matter, and I’m hoping it’s not because I’m all of a sudden irrelevant. (Though if you know something I don’t know, please comment…

It’s made me realize that in order for 24 hours of blogging to meaningful, it must do something that none of those other methods of communicating are doing. Blogging – during the Blogathon but also as an activity and a form of communication more generally – will retain its value by getting back to its roots, by doing what it does better and more effectively than any of those other methods.

What Blogging Is To Me (Now)

The way I see it (shooting from the hip here), the strengths and characteristics of online media can be viewed as interfacing with people through three aspects: topicality, timeliness, and people. All content has a different approach to each aspect. Microblogging/status updates and IM approach these three things differently, and that’s why, despite their similarities in feel, they are still quite different. These media also all amalgamate, overlap and include each other through hyperlinking and republishing, something I discovered once I started using Tumblr for TransLinked.

So where am I’m going with this? Blogging’s strength for me, at this juncture, comes in its unique mix of timeliness (not uber-timely) with the longer format and a reasonably elegant use of links. There’s a great sense of reflection, that is part of its charm. And I know that as I start my master’s, it will become more important for me to chart my progress through the ideas, either privately or publicly. In this way, Blogathon is also very timely. No time like the present to find a balance between self-indulgence and providing value.

My Blogathon Rules (Version 0.1)

In order to make the blogathon experience for you, as my readers, my sponsors and my friends, more pleasant, and to ensure that what happens on July 25th is truly amazing and a cut above and beyond what you’d get from my daily FriendFeed, here are the rules I’ve established as part of my Blogathon participation (with some inspiration from Karen Hamilton at TinyBites):

1. No link round-up posts. This rule’s going to be interesting to follow, because I think they’re fairly easy and provide non-zero value. While they have a timeliness and content value to them, it sometimes seems to me that it could be much more comprehensive and interesting to click on a keyword in Delicious, or to dip into my Google Reader shared items. So I’m ruling this kind of post out for Blogathon. You’ll notice I don’t typically write these kinds of posts regularly anyway, so it’s not so hard for me to exclude them.
2. Keep the meta to a minimum. In the wee hours on July 26th, I’m sure it will be very tempting to talk about how tired I am, or how I’ve run out of blog post outlines to draw from to write more posts on. But honestly, that’s what Twitter’s for (or, more accurately, the private Twitter account). If I write it in a blog post, I want it to have some relevance to the content and the point, which is to raise money for the Vancouver Public Space Network. Granted, I’m aware that writing about blogging (like I’m doing right now) is one of the great traditions of blogging. And I’m not ruling out putting things on the blog outside of the long-form essay for the sake of experimentation or artistic expression. It just means, I’ll strive to keep the obvious moaning to a minimum, like… 140 characters per blog post or something.
3. Refer to, use, love The List. So far, I have a spreadsheet of blog post ideas for blogathon, which breaks down the topic, the effort required to write it (in terms of research, prep, etc.), the type of blog post it is, and who’s writing it (since I will be featuring guest posting). Mind you, these are ideas, not fully-completed posts, so not all the heavy lifting’s done.With 9 days to go, I have 22 blog post ideas in the list, and I hope to have that close to 40 before the 24th. The ideas on that list are also not from blog posts I’ve committed to completing before Blogathon either, so the event theoretically doesn’t mean 9 days of silence until the deluge.
4. It’s not OK OK to schedule posts. As I’ve mentioned, there are two events happening on Blogathon Day that I will find it very difficult to miss: the open house for the Granville station on the Canada Line, and Illuminares, the lantern festival at Trout Lake. I’ll have to close the laptop to go to those events, but I also want to stay in the spirit of Blogathon, so I will commit to scheduling no more than 8 blog posts in total for the entire Blogathon Day, in order to give me some breathing room to get to the events, grab a bit to eat and to enjoy myself a bit. Well, I’ll still be whipping out Richard‘s iPhone to blog about events, but I’m going to have to think of something else to do since scheduling is against the rules. These two events in and of themselves are community events of somewhat different stripes, organized by different organizations, in public space, and I hope to be able to illustrate the differences between them through the blog posts.
5. Variety is the spice of life. I’m also commiting to not blogging about the same topic more than once. So there will be one blog post from each of the Open House and Illuminares, not five.

So, any thoughts? Those who have done the Blogathon before – do you think these will make the blogathon too difficult? Have I made it too easy for myself with some of these rules? Have I missed any that you think are important to the experience?

Everyone else – would you like to sponsor me based on whether I’m able to keep to all these rules?

More than likely, it’s a poor marketing segmentation strategy, but I’m going to go with what works when it comes to wringing content out of the old knocker. I’m quite happy with what I’ve put out so far, the sort of balance between awesome-celebratory and kicking conceptual ass that really speaks to me. It’s also a mix of Vancouver inward-looking and worldly outside-looking. I’ll look to implementing some proper openID comments on it – Tumblr’s are typically about the wham and less the dialogic follow-up. (I just wish I could use something besides Disqus, I want to bask in the spam-free glow for a little while longer.)

Drop by, take a look, and tell me what you think! TransLinked does have an RSS feed as well, so subscribe if you’re not down with the skinny layout. My first big piece is a closer look at the net impact of TransLink’s decision to replace paper bus schedules at bus stops with instructions on using HandiMobility’s text messaging service.

Mean what you say even if you fall short of what you proclaim. – Open Manifesto

Everything I write is an accurate reflection of how I felt at the time. – Richard

I strive…

• to mean what I say.
• to mean compassionately.
• to make my meanings unambiguous.
• to share, author and revise my opinions, the sum of my experiences, openly.
• to do justice to the complexities.

Please bear with me while I learn to uncensor myself, and then learn again how to avoid waving my uglies around.

A few months back, Mark Kuznicki asked us in the TorCamp chat, “When we say ‘open cities’ what does it make you dream?” I’m not a dreamer by nature, so I’ll forgo any real responses; instead I’ll just bring the question to others, and bring pieces of my own answers.

Working For The Behemoth

I’ve given a lot of thought to the question of what role my day job should have in this blog. I’ve decided that, although I will tell bloggers that I meet in person who I work for, I will not be blogging about work at all. Which is kind of unfortunate because, although my feelings on it be mixed at the worst of times, there are some things I genuinely like about my work. However, between the fact that my employer actively promotes a rather closed culture of secrecy, and the fact that I’ve been told many times that I’m losing my indie cred by working at this company, I think I’ll leave work out of it. I will refer to the company on this site only by the title The Behemoth, and I would much appreciate those who do know where I work to not make mention of it in either comments on this blog or on their own sites.

The real shame about this is that the only place I feel “safe” blogging about work is to my Livejournal friends list–a limited audience that is interested but perhaps less able to comment than the general population, especially since being on Livejournal makes me sounds like a whining self-centred brat. Or simply inspires me to play one.

Public Persona

The decision to blog or not blog about work has given me an opportunity to think about the concept of public persona in general. The fun thing about blogging has always been its personability, the way people can mention their personal lives mere sentences from the work of their lives without it being completely out of context. Much of that has to do with personal writing style and intended audience, obviously–some people never mention anything but their work, just as many use their blogs to document personal arenas of their life to the exclusion of all else. (Then there are those blogs that are entirely in the realm of fantasy. I haven’t stumbled upon many of those yet, except maybe the fake celebrity blogs.)

Like many things, my position in this spectrum will undoubtedly emerge from trial and error. This blog also does exist in opposition to other things: namely, my Livejournal and my paper journal (as well as my work blog, but I don’t really write in there yet anyway). Hence, I am certain that I will be doing my best to distinguish this from the writing that happens in those areas, and just roll with it.