In our era where there’s a million new things on the web everyday competing for attention, how do you get attention? Do Good.
Take for instance Collis Ta’eed, an Australian freelance web designer, who like just about every other web designer started one of those Web 2.0 sites. Nice, but nothing special, just another blip on the swiftly flowing information river. He decides to do something Good.
He creates out of nothing more than the idea in his head something called Blog Action Day – what if every blog in the world talked about one thing that needs talking about on the same day? This year, it’s the environment, and as of right now 10,233 14,000+ blogs (Lifehack.org is one of them) with an audience of 8,283,014 12 million+ people – are going to get Monday one hell of a wake up call on this topic.
Add in the mainstream media, the power of the Long Tail, and I’d bet something like 40,000,000 people are going to at least think about the environment Monday. One person, two months, 40 million people. That’s some serious attention.
Think it’s a one off? Well, take another bunch of do-gooder web designers – MakaluMedia – who did a project for the Ecology Center. The goal, the Good Thing? Make it easy to get off the bizillion paper catalog mailing lists out there so maybe next year instead of 19 billion paper catalogs produced and mailed and trashed annually in the U.S., there’s only say, 15 billion. How many trees will that save?
Now, either web designers have been bestowed with supernatural abilities, or they realize something the rest of us haven’t gotten the word on yet: Doing Good on the web gets you noticed big time – and it’s not that hard.
The blogosphere has been denigrated by mainstream media pundits as being an echo chamber – and they were half right in the wrong way. The blogosphere amplifies Good ideas – the better the idea, the more people buy into it, and suddenly, it’s not so hard to get attention anymore.
Bob Walsh blogs about different aspects of the digital lifestyle at 47hats and Clear Blogging. His second book, Clear Blogging, is now available at Amazon and elsewhere.
