Ever since I read about Blogathon last year, I've been impressed with the power of the internet to convey a message and help a cause.
I'm considering (and definitely will, in one shape or form) participating in Blogathon 2004, which is set to take place on Saturday, July 24th this year. If you're not familiar with the event, it goes like so: Participating writers of blogs (like me for this site) sign up at the Blogathon site and choose a charity. They then solicit donations to that charity during a 24-hour event, during which they write a new post at least every 15 minutes. The event in 2004 will last from 9am local time on Saturday to 9am local time Sunday. If bloggers abide by the rules, they will have added 96 new entries to their blogs by the end of the event.
Outside of the Blogathon, blog entries are mundane. "What I ate for lunch." "My impressions of George Bush's policies." The Blogathon gives people incentive to offer up a consistent, concentrated flow of interesting posts. In 2003 my favorite entry was by Scott and Shannon over at Pet Rock Star where they collaboratively created two very good songs over the span of 24 hours and the breadth of a continent. If you've been here or talked to me last July, it was all I could talk about for weeks, and the idea still ignites that exciting sparkler in my brain that says, "This is exquisite."
I've been discussing with Berta and friends about what I might use as a hook to get people to come to the site and read and leave donations for my charity. Of course, I'll have to choose a worthy charity first.
I was thinking about choosing something that affects me personally, but that feels fake. If I really wanted to contribute to a charity, something should pop directly into mind. Nothing does. It's not that I don't think there are worthy charities, just that I don't have any affinity to any of them. Perhaps I'll have to contact my more philanthropic friends and ask them what they think. (Or they could just leave word here.)
Maybe a better idea would be to donate any sponsorships to an organization like the United Way, where it can be applied to tasks locally that are deserving and in need.
The Big Idea
I want to produce a radio play and publish it on the internet. I would create an outline of plot paths in advance, but no actual script. Every hour, I would develop enough script for 5 minutes of dialogue. (1 minute generally equals one page of script.)
But that's not all... I want the story to be interactive. So if people donate to my selected charity, they will have an option to modify the story in some way. Now, I'm not so ambitious as to let them dictate plot directly, but I might plan out several avenues in my plot path outline and allow the donors to vote for which avenue I should follow when I write the next segment.
Other user contributions might include suggesting objects, words, or scenarios that should be present in the next segment. For example, a person might suggest that a bowl of fruit appear in the next segment, and I would write it in. Too outlandish suggestions might not make it, but reasonably mundane things shouldn't be too difficult to insert.
To get a break in the middle of the long day, a listener-suggested dream sequence might be produced. Suggestions for the dream sequence would be taken starting at the beginning of the day, so it would allow plenty of time for planning and writing.
As I've been describing this so far, it's just me doing the work. Well, that's going to be impossible. I will need at least a couple more people to record the voices of the characters in the play. It would probably be very helpful to have other writers (not that the actors couldn't also write, but more minds seems like a good idea) to help provide ideas or to write separate segments of the story. Someone has to post something every 15 minutes, and if I'm busy writing script, either the raw script is going to be posted or someone else (and this is what I would prefer) will publish production notes and "what's going on now".
My plan for coordinating it all works like this: At the top of the hour, the audio is posted. For the first quarter hour, the team discusses possibilities for the next segment based on the options we've provided to the audience, and we start putting a skeleton up for the next segment to hang on.
During the next 15 minutes, we write out the one segment that we think is most likely to be selected by the voters. If it's used, hurray - a break! If not, we post it (like, here's what might have happened) and get to work on writing what they did select.
Between 30 and 45 past the hour, we're either writing or recording, depending on how well we were able to predict listener voting. Of course, we'd try to get the whole thing done early because we would want to add sound effects and music to the clips before posting in online. The 45-minute post could include audio outtakes from the production, the script notes from writing, or teasers of the upcoming segment.
Hopefully all of the recording would be done before the 55 minute mark, allowing for last-minute audio rendering and upload time.
After 24 hours of 5 minute clips, the result would be a 2 hour long audio drama. It didn't sound like there would be this much audio when I started describing it, did it? We would have a movie-length play in audio at the end, and a script that we could release under a creative commons license. (If you don't know about or fully understand cc, this comic is a great introduction. Or try this flash movie.)
Clearly, this is not a job for me alone. Because this would be such an undertaking, I'm not really worried about anyone stealing the idea for their own use in Blogathon '04. In fact, if you want to use this idea, go ahead. The main reason I wanted to do this is because I think that I would enjoy listening to a radio play over the internet.
Here comes my crazy idea for getting the work done: Instead of all of the local bloggers possibly doing their own thing for Blogathon '04, I suggest that we all get together and produce this thing.
It's an ideal arrangement. We all get to participate and help a charity, one that I'm certainly open for suggestions in choosing. It'll be a fun and supportive time rather than a solitary 24 hours of sacrifice. We'll produce something marvellously cool (admit it, no matter how dumb the play turns out, it'll still be cool) that is content we can all share.
And here's a technical benefit- If we each host a piece of the audio during the day, we split the bandwidth on it. We could have a central management site for our listing at Blogathon, but it could redirect randomly to any of our pages. The links to the audio files would point to the servers on which they were actually hosted. So my site would host hours 1, 5, and 9, and someone else's would host 2, 6, and 10, and so on.
If we all get excited about the project and all put a bit of effort in getting the word out about our participation in it, we could probably do a great service to a worthy charity - hopefully more than we could have done individually.
What do you think? If you have ideas, please share. If you want to help or are interested, let me know. It'll be good to start planning early so that we know what we'll be doing on that date. (Now you know why I posted this 5 months in advance!)
I think this is a great idea, and I'll probably go ahead with it if I can get at least a couple of people to commit to the voice acting. If you can commit your time (technical, writing, acting), you'll be appreciated.
I've spent a good bit of time over the past week (probably to Chris' chagrin) working on media functionality for Habari. You can see my quick, obviously unrehearsed screencast describing all of the features visually if you don't want to read my post.
I was waxing nostalgic with some other folks on IRC the other day about computers that we had grown up with. My very first computer was a Timex Sinclair 2000. 