If I Blogathoned, This Is How It Happened

I was reading about this Blogathon thing and it sounded kinda interesting to be posting up tons of posts all day and generating money for charity. Here’s how it works. Of course there are some tangible benefits as well.

The next Blogathon is July 28, 2007. Watch this space.

You have to get your own sponsors, and also the requirements are kinda tight. 48 posts in 24 hours? You also can’t pre-write or future-date the posts, although you can certainly outline a game plan for your 48 posts. This kinda works against simply posting about one episode every block, since an episode will take you at least 20 minutes to watch, and that leaves you less than 10 minutes to write about the episode. Unless of course you are watching Naruto, in which case you can copy-pasta the same episode summary over and over again: “Gaara is getting his tails sucked out of every orifice.”

In case you’re interested, here are some articles to get you started:

How to Blogathon | How Not to Blogathon

However, I don’t want to leave this as a post where I mention this is a nice idea and then just say it’s too hard to contribute. Although I don’t think I will be participating, here are a few of my thoughts about what I would do. This is keeping in mind the time constraints, and the need to keep readers interested.

1. Sponsors: I wonder if any companies would be willing to sponsor you if you did a themed blogathon. Like if you watched all Geneon licensed material and posted about it, wouldn’t that be both interesting and promotional? Plus, you could say you were watching Ikkitousen for a good cause… It would be hard to do this with episode summaries, unless you wrote an episode summary for every hourly post (24 posts from the typical 26 episode season), and wrote a quick thought on the half hour posts. If you have multiple writers on your blog, you could stagger them on different series.
2. Write: I think a fanfiction thing could work pretty easily and keep readers engaged. If you took commentary from readers or did it round-robin style, with each post being a few paragraphs, the process wouldn’t be too bad. If it has character x character without devolving into a lemon that could be even better. I think that this is probably the easiest way to participate and keep readers interested.
3. Sketch: If you draw hella fast, like Rukia fast, you could probably do a fun fanart thing with sketches coming every 30 minutes. It wouldn’t be too hard, especially if you put in some parodies as well. Or perhaps you could release a box of a series of 4koma every half hour. Twelve 4koma will net you 48 posts if you have one box per post.
4. Go Back In Time: You could do quicky reviews of 3 series from every year of anime. If you watch a lot of anime and have been a longtime fan, it would not be super difficult to find 3 worthwhile (or perhaps overlooked) series and write up some good/bad/ugly points about the series. At 3 a year, you would only have to go back to like 1988. Alternatively you could start with less series per year, and work you way up to more current series. This would be one of the easier ideas to incorporate into a group blog.
5. Sing: If you have a great voice, you could sing 48 karaoke versions of anime OP/ED. I don’t know how long it would take to edit, but you would have a little time to play around. This could also be done with a group blog, although who knows how funky the songs could be sounding around the 23rd hour. You would also have to find the tracks ahead of time (unless you are so uber you can arrange and play them on the fly yourself). Who knows, maybe this could be your big break?
6. List: It wouldn’t be hard to highlight 48 scenes you love or 48 characters you love. If you ranked them, that might be fun, but better get the flame-suit ready first.
7. Globalize: One of the major stumbling points of the Blogathon is that it involves staying awake for 24 hours. At least with a walkathon, you don’t have to worry about suddenly falling asleep. This makes it easier for group-blogs to participate, but a schedule would have to be worked out ahead of time. Also, it is recommended that you use your main blog to launch your Blogathon posts, so a blogger would have to open up his blog to foreigners if he/she didn’t already have a team in place. I wonder if something like AnimeNano could be harnessed for this situation. On the one hand, the anime blogging community is international, which helps overcome time zone problems. On the other hand, the anime blogging community is generally kind of lazy T__T. Present company is not excluded.

Anyway, those are just some ideas I hatched up. Is anyone planning on participating in the Blogathon? Does anyone have any other anime-related Blogathon ideas?

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