A blog-a-thon is a recent phenomenon in the blogosphere. It consists of a number of bloggers writing posts on a certain subject. According to girish the word was coined by Darren of longpauses.com (although I couldn’t find the post). Girish conducted a blog-a-thon on avant-garde cinema early August. The earliest post I was able to trace featuring the term blog-a-thon is this one.
Since I am a fan of Wikipedia, I wish that the participants to blog-a-thons would share their knowledge with the entire world by contributing the results of their efforts to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia equivalent of blog-a-thons are called Wikipedia Collaborations or WikiProjects. One possible future trend could be blikis, a combination of blogs with a wiki system. I first came across the concept of the bliki two years ago in this post by Belgian blogger forret.
If I’m remembering all this correctly, the chronology goes something like this.
In January, I proposed the idea (see the comments to this post, about half to two-thirds of the way down), and suggested we write about Showgirls. (Greencine link; we called it a “blog orgy” to begin with.) My friend Darren, in his Showgirls post, used the word “blog-a-thon,” and the name stuck.
The second one was Code Unknown, which you’ve already seen. The third was Altman, hosted by Matt Zoller Seitz, and the fourth Abel Ferrara, which I hosted. After that, there have been several others around the blogosphere (I’ve lost track now of exactly how many). Of these, I was only able to take part in the ones on Michelle Pfeiffer and (yesterday) Friz Freleng.
Thanks for the clarifications, girish. It’s very enjoyable being able to receive comments, I think I made a good decision by switching to WordPress. Good night.
Elsewhere, folks have been calling them Carnivals. There is even a carnival tracking system going on here, http://truthlaidbear.com/ubercarnival.php, and here, http://blogcarnival.com/.
Carnivals normally operate by submission to the host (or via a form at the blogcarnival site). The host then links to them all and all the blogs participating and others reading notify readers.
As I understand it, the top political blogger in the US, http://instapundit.com, has a policy of linking to any carnival at all, just because he supports the concept. It’s just a matter of writing him to let him know about it and he’ll make the announcement on his blog. (Or did so, last I heard.)
Not that you have to call them carnivals,but you can take advantage of a system that exposes the event to a wider audience and, thus, attracts more readers and commentary and, possibly, participation.
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