A new breed of activists changing the world with their ideas, technology, and passion. Are you with the program? Visit the blog and take the quiz to find out!
November is National Novel Writing Month, in which people set out to write a novel in a month. The idea is just crazy enough that it works. Last year, more than 119,000 tried it, and 21,000 writers completed their goal of 50,000 words in the month.
Which brings us to this graph, from a great article by Denis Pelli and Charles Bigelow in Seed Magazine. Historically, they wondered, how much authoring has there been? And how has the recent explosion of personal publishing, with blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the rest, impacted authoring? The results are quantified in this graph, which shows that, by their estimates, 100% of humanity will be writing by 2013.
Now a tweet does not a novel make. Pelli and Bigelow based their numbers on estimates of writing that reaches more than 100 people. From a historical perspective, that makes sense—for much of the book’s history, 100 people was a huge audience. And these statistics extrapolate from Twitter and company’s astronomical growth. Click through to read the footnotes, which explain Pelli and Bigelow’s assumptions.
How does 100% authorship change your business?
In philanthropy, might it reduce the cult of the expert? Contests and competitions give rise to their own results-based expertise. Scaling, as always, becomes an issue, and people with scaling expertise even more valuable.
Fundraising comes to look like what Kiva’s Matt Flannery calls “the larger trend toward more connected experiences.” At home, we are all walkathoning (or growing mustaches) and asking our friends to help.
In journalism and publishing, it looks like the rise of the individual reputation and the individual voice. Blogs over mainstream publications. Aggregators will still be important, be they search engines, social networks, or perhaps mainstream web properties.
The shift to short, quick, forms like Twitter reduces the influence of professional copywriters. Amateurs have the time to write influential micro posts. Sharing among friends becomes the measure of influence.
This changes the search engines’ power as the reference source. Right now Google is struggling to keep up with real time publishing. Here’s Jeremiah Owyang on what the search engines’ shift to realtime means for reaching people:
Search marketers must understand that blasting marketing information through Facebook or Twitter won’t be effective, as search engines will filter out irrelevant messages that nobody listens to.
It comes down to content that’s useful, that other people can share. In a future where everybody writes, will anybody notice if your organization doesn’t?
Tags: fundraising social media writing
Comments