So... what exactly is a 'Blogathon?'
Or 'How does it feel to be able to put so much caffeine toward a worthy cause?'
First some terminology. The word "blog" is a shortened version of "weblog", which is a frequently updated personal website. Most blogs have date stamps on the entries, and consist of links and commentary.
Now, remember when you were in school and you would bowl for charity? And for every pin you knocked down you got, say, ten cents? Or run for a dollar a mile? During the Blogathon, people update their websites every 30 minutes for 24 hours straight. For this, they collect sponsorships. Pledges can be a flat donation, or a certain amount for every hour the blogger manages to stay awake.
So how exactly does this work?
Easy: you sign up to sponsor a blogger. On July 26th, watch your blogger go for 24 hours straight. When the event is over, you'll receive an email asking you to donate directly to the charity for which your participant was blogging.
If you'd like the big challenge of blogging, choose a charity and sign up!
How did all this get started?
In the summer of 2000, blogger Cat Connor decided that a free weekend could be combined with a marathon session of insomnia to have some fun with her personal website. In fact, Cat decided to update frytopia every 15 minutes for an entire 24 hours, for a total of 96 posts over the course of a single day.
Armed only with a stack of movies and a case of Mountain Dew, Cat plunged headfirst into a day’s worth of blogging and wound up surviving it in spectacular fashion – even earning some notoriety among her blogging associates along the way.
Along with her newfound attention, Cat came to a realization: staying up all night to update her website could represent a lot more than a caffeine-and-cinema-drenched exercise in butt-numbness. Or, in the more eloquent words of Cat herself, "I've always felt the best thing about the web was its ability to affect the real world. The web can be a major force for good."
Thus, Blogathon was born. The first annual event occurred in 2001, when Cat invited friends and other bloggers to join her in her sleepless marathon. Over a hundred participants stayed awake on July 28 and 29, some doing so in spectacular fashion: there were virtual mix tapes, physical collages, shoes aplenty, and even dreams for the sleepy. Altogether, bloggers raised over $20,000 for 77 different charities in 2001 and garnered even more attention than Cat had on her own the year before, prompting her to confirm Blogathon’s perennial nature: “[2001’s] success outstripped all my expectations, so we're here for good.”
For 2002, Cat put together a team to help her build on that success, and get even more people involved. "Creating an international community over the course of 24 hours--one with a single purpose--is something that can only happen on the web. It makes the web magical. I'd love to see it become absolutely huge, though I admit I'm a little intimidated by it as well," she said.
The second annual event saw the inclusion of highlighted charities, a automated backend for the Blogathon site, and even more gimmicks ranging from posting in Haiku, to uploading a retrospective biography via photographs, to writing a novel. The number of bloggers more than doubled, and the event raised over $50,000 charities around the world. Each year the process is refined, and now small staff of talented volunteers are responsible for bringing off ever larger and more elaborate Blogathons in 2003 and for years to come.
