Blipathon was the brainchild of Brian Greene a social radio advocate based in Dublin Ireland. Using social radio platform Blip.FM 144 DJs in all corners of the Earth got together over the world wide web on Valentines Day February 14th 2009 to share the love & open the hearts and by extension the wallets of these social DJs and their 10’s of thousands of listeners. The recipients of the donations would be the kids of Gaza.
Greene himself decided to do the full 24hrs non stop, starting at 00.00 Saturday morning and finishing up 24 hours later. The rest of the DJs committed anything from an hour to the whole day to help out. The simple task was to blip (play) songs of love, peace & enjoyment and along with each track asking people to go to blipathon.com and donate money to TuesdaysChild.ie using the charity’s PayPal button.
Over the course of the day in which blip went down for a total of 5 hours, we continued with audio & video linear broadcasts, a total ot 5075 tracks were played for the blipathon and £971 = €1084 = $1386 was donated. Much was learned on the day, and future blipathons are expected.
Big thanks to all the DJs & the crew at Blip.FM. Donations are still welcome at TuesdaysChild.ie
Some lessons learned.
Social media can organise people to act, but action happens in the real world so future events would see real world venues come into play. Music is an international language, presenting no barriers to mass organisation. Gaming (group activity for a purpose) on social media is extremely viral with over 150 viewers tuned to our TV stream at its peak. Audit trails and live totals of cash donations are an assist we could have done with. Democracy within the organistaion of people must be social & democratic, Social democracies have a big future in a world of Facebook Blip.fm blogs twitter ustream.tv & YouTube.
the 144 were
