I think you succeeded in Point One — clearly your trip was successful in getting the new bloggers up and running. The third point, effecting awareness over time, needs time. It’s the second point I am concerned about — news is news when it is new. I think the wrong social networks were activated — my personal opinion — I would’ve asked the not-for-profit bloggers, the live local, the issues-aware ones to get behind this campaign. Not the media/marketing bloggerati who are inundated with requests to support issues. I’m not sure if this was your responsibility or you just got roped into talking up your work with Cult of Pesce network.

If there was no PR campaign around your travel, then so be it. You did your job, you came home, end of subject. But if there was supposed to be an awareness raising, activation of social media discussions, then it was not as successful.

The point of my post is that I had the same issues in Saudi — I trained them, they signed up 1,000s of members per day. We actually did really well in PR and media — but not in Australia. Shel Israel, BlogHer and others picked up the story — that conference that Scoble and Winer etc went to in China talked about the project. Shel included the work I did in a book sponsored by SAP. But Australia? Not a ticketyboo.

Either there is something different with the way we activate social media bloggers here, or else we downgrade everyone’s actions to Tall Poppy — insincere attention seeking behaviour. Such a shame.

You refer to this post as a boil being lanced. Last night on Twitter I described it as unblocking the constipation. Same thing, really: something unpleasantly unhealthy was getting in the way of regular operations, and now the blockage has been removed.

@rob manser: Something you said just hit me:

[Given] the initial concept of giving poverty a voice — it worked.

Well, I still think it’s too early to tell. We have a blog online, yes, but it may or may not turn into something worthwhile in the long term. However, it does raise an important question…

Which of these two aims was the real aim of the project?

1. Give poverty a voice.
2. Look at me and tell your friends! I’m giving poverty a voice!

Humans are highly-evolved social animals. I think we have a special part of the brain designed to detect insincere attention-seeking behaviour.

If it ain’t, I pondered further, then someone’s done him a grand favour of summarising and publishing each of the key flaws that must have gnawed at him throughout this journey.

You see, now we can say that the boil has been lanced; one of the impediments to getting back to the business on reflecting upon, writing about and discussing project TOTO is now removed. (seriously, semicolons signify nothing…)

I am very easily pleased. I found the tweets exercised my imagination (did someone mention goats?) and I saw it as a key outcome for the project when I was able to post a response to Abdul’s first blog entry.

Clearly, Stilgherrian would have benefited from adding an advisory to his #toto writings that at the first signs of boredom, the reader should immediately seek entertainment distraction from a big budget movie DVD…

TOTO has only just begun.

For some people, the way the project unfolded on the ground didn’t fit with their expectations, and that caused tension.

I was one of those people.

I’d envisaged posting a wond’rous essay every morning — which usually requires me to be at my desk, undisturbed, for a couple hours and involves plenty of pacing and thinking. Or every evening — but that never works because I’m a morning person. I don’t know why I imagined that I’d succeed. A morning of writing usually means my afternoon is good for nothing but minor housekeeping tasks, not more brain-intensive work. So I was extremely stressed because I wasn’t meeting my own expectations.

Until I changed my expectations.

For some reason, though, it took a couple days to realise that I needed to work with the reality in front of me, not with an imagined plan which has been rendered obsolete by changing circumstances.

Yes, “instantaneousness” is a word.

@rob manser: Thanks, but there’s a long way to go yet. The bloggerati surged to Jambo Tanzania to congratulate the guys on their initial posts. But I wonder how many subscribed to the RSS feed, or went back to read the post about malaria?

if giving the initial concept of giving poverty a voice – it worked. The problem here, is that the blog-o-sphere is full of people who “virtually” live in the world that they create. Not the real world. I fear that , blogging about this to bloggers will not give the aims that you set out to do – realistically, ActionAID and your aim – as i saw it – was to connect the poor of africa to THE WORLD… not just to bloggers, but THROUGH bloggers!

Self importance will always be the downfall of the blog-o-sphere, so congratulations on trying to bridge the gap between the rest of humanity, the poor and the poor bloggers.

I think you have started something great.

cheers

Rob

i also knew about your trip well in advance, but again that’s because i follow you on twitter, as well as a few of your closer colleagues (your crikey comrades particularly really talked up the project #toto adventure, even building suspense with their very entertaining #sekritmission references).

i think possibly people expected the instantaneousness (is that a word?) of social media to equate to a similar instantaneousness (if i use it twice, i *has* to be a word, right?) in the project #toto output. as i commented on @barrysaunders’ ‘blog, i think the ‘social justice’ crowd and the ‘social media’ crowd are still getting to understand one another – and to learn each others’ limitations.

what i think we can look forward to tho’ is momentum – as your subsequent posts begin to roll into the next Outreach Blogger’s mission, and so on, and so forth (assuming it continues to move forward like that) the effect will snowball.

your contribution will seem greater as time moves on, as a snowball forms around it – but without it, the next ‘blocks’ will have nothing to stick to. i assume (and indeed hope) that your words won’t simply cease when the next blogger takes the chair.

well done, i have enjoyed the journey so far, and i look forward to hearing more over the coming days, weeks and months.