Won’t you please help?

I must admit, I always found Sally Struthers a little over the top in her Save the Children campaign.

But now that I’m running a blogathon for hunger and only at 10% of my goal of raising $400, I’m feeling a little bit like Sally myself, only without the wholesome TV cuteness and the squeaky high pitched voice.

It’s always easy not to help. I do it at least 99% of the time myself. So the victory rate is bound to be low on donations as well. It’s human nature, I suppose. Tivo was no doubt invented by PBS telethons.

But I’m having fun anyway.

Recently I posted a blogroll link to a Real Estate Blog directory — look there it is again, albeit with a penalty nofollow tag. It seems these industrious fellows are garnering page rank by encouraging reciprocal links back to their blog directory — sort of a Web 2.0 circa so-ten-minutes-ago approach.

Well, that was fine, I bit. Here’s a portion of the confirmation I received:

YOUR LISTING HAS BEEN ACTIVATED!
—————————————————–
Thursday 30th of November 2006 08:55:50 PM
Name: John Lockwood
URL: http://www.placerville-realestate.com
Title: Amador and El Dorado County Real Estate Blog
Description: Local Realtors® discuss homes, land, and the real estate market in Amador County and El Dorado County, California.
Reciprocal: http://www.placerville-realestate.com
Reciprocal Verified: Y

Well, so far so good, except today I was doing some surfing around, and lo, my incoming link was gone, as was the rest of my customer record. So either their MySQL DBA has been hitting the crack pipe pretty hard since getting out of rehab, or this site is deliberately scamming webmasters to grow their incoming link count.

Well, some good came out of it — it’s something to post about so these scammers just helped a hungry person. And now we’ve added a touch of caveat linktor to out blog. Sweet.

OK all you famous people, now’s your chance. Link to this post or post a comment here!

Please note the following important information: Posting a comment here or linking to this post constitutes the definition of fame in the real estate blogging community.

Failing to comment here or link to this post means you’re a relative unknown. Hey, don’t blame me, I just make up the rules, I don’t enforce them.

This evening it ocurred to me that most of the day was spent on real estate one way or another, and that, because I had to run more comps and meet a seller in Camino tomorrow, tomorrow would look like that as well.

Well, that’s fine by me, I enjoy being busy. But it also reminded me that I haven’t blogged since “way back yesterday”, which is an acceptable level of blogicity for any normal period of time. Of course, if you’re running a blogathon, a post a day looks a lot to outsiders like goofing off, and heaven forbid you should think that of me.

I came across a fun article recently about excuses not to blog, which canonically take the syntactical form, “Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, but…”.

Sorry I haven’t found that URL in a while so I could link to it.

By now it’s clear that the dog who ate my homework is the same dog who is the bane of every kid’s homework, but as for a fine December: I’ve gotten to go to two parties so far with my wife, and it’s only December 2nd. My wife and I usually go to about two parties a year, so there you go, we’re all caught up. One of them was a bunko party, which is a woman-only gathering where they let the men in once a year near Christmas to see if we’re still alive. It turns out I am.

I considered that good news.

The other party was Micah’s birthday party! Hooray. We have some pictures you can enjoy over on my Folsom Site. You win a prize if you can find my wife. Meantime, here are the two I think came out the best, one of Micah getting to know Joey, and one of the happy mom and dad.

Oh yeah, and Uncle Bob is from Plymouth! So there you go, this has something to do with Amador county after all…

Well, here it is 4:00 AM on Blogathon launch day — that seems an appropriate time to start! I may retreat for a few more winks before the official start of my day, but meantime I’m up and the coffee is hot, so I’d like to start out by thanking those folks who’ve encouraged me so far and the only person to make a pledge to date, Judy Onorato of Financial Title. Judy’s generous pledge has started us off, so now I have to come up with twenty posts. Oh darn, I’m a blogger and I have to write twenty posts.

This is almost as awful as having to eat some chocolate or something.

Thank you Judy, for helping out.

Being an early adopter means that someone in El Dorado County or Amador County who wouldn’t have enough to eat otherwise now will have, and how cool is that?

It also means that Judy’s donation is subject to some of our $ MATCHING FUNDS $ .

(I thought it would be nice to establish a typographical convention early and often for $ MATCHING FUNDS $ .)

The point of that is that there are two hundred dollars of John Lockwood Associates corporate bucks available to match the first two hundred dollars in contributions that you make. And depending on how many remote contributors chime in, and we already have four or five, there’s up to $100 in additional matching funds available.

So, thank you already on what’s barely the first four-AM day to those remote bloggers who’ve already chimed in briefly and agreed to participate, Dustin Luther, Fraser Beach, Hanan Levin, Jim Cronin (who’s checking us out — how we doing so far?), and the bloggers/teammates Maureen Francis and Dmitry Koublitsky.

Thanks finally to Cori Whalen at Placer Title, who’s handed out our fliers and talked us up quite a bit here locally.

Thanks as well to Bridget and Helen, my fellow bloggers who’ll be chiming in as we go along.

With that, I have thirty minutes left.  How many winks is that?

Well, my Hunger Blogathon 2006 Fever is growing to a fever pitch. Lucky for me I skipped the flu shot this year.

The PDF fliers and a few paper copies are ready, and I’m off to one of the local MLS tours tomorrow to see what sorts of pledges I can draw. Meantime my invitation to the Invited Famous People is all set up in email, just waiting for me to say something intelligent. The blogathon starts the day after tomorrow, and I have to get my daughter Helen some help so she can pitch in and participate, and I have to put my thinking cap on, because Bridget (also known as “Lucky Bridget”) is in Disneyland for a few days getting a well earned rest. So she may not weigh in until she returns, but then may be able to regale us with her Matterhorn adventures.

What it’s about:

The Blogathon is a benefit for the El Dorado County and Amador County food banks. That’s our local focus area for this blog, and it’s also where our intrepid band of blogger participants all live. 100% of your pledges will be donated to these two food banks, on a 50/50 basis.

How to Pledge:

We’ve tried to make pledging pretty easy to do, at the risk of constantly saying “Operators are Standing By.”

You can call (877) 735-5657 and either talk to me or Bridget or leave a voice mail, or you can fax us the Pledge Flier (PDF). Sorry there’s no online form for it yet — I should try to get one together in time for next year’s Blogathon.

So I hope that many people locally and in the blogging community will participate. So far the flier’s assumption is that you can only sponsor the local blogging team, but as an incentive for the wider community of bloggers who wishes to participate, let’s do the following:

• To the $200 that is earmarked already in matching funds, I will add $10.00 in matching funds for each blogger from another blog who participates either by an external link or by an in-line comment on the “Famous People Weigh In” (or any other post), up to an additional $100.
• Though unfortunately we can only offer good links and not prize money for the following portion, we’ll announce winners in the following categories:
• Most people invited to participate by a non-sponsored blogger.
• Best suggestion for making the blogathon better either this year or in the future.
• Funniest related post.
• Most heartwarming / sincere related post.Winners in the above category will be announced here and on my two other blogs.

Well, that’s all I have for now, but hopefully that piques some small amount of interest.

Yes, on some level this blogathon helps us to kick-start the visibility of a new blog, but it’s also for a worthy cause, so I hope it we’re at least able to raise a modest amount of funds and have a little fun doing so. In any case it’s a decent first attempt, and perhaps next year we can do even better if it works out.

Well, as I was promoting this year’s blogathon on another site, it occurred to me that I should invite a bunch of famous real estate bloggers to participate. So I’ll be sending out a bunch of email invitations as well, but for now I thought I’d just put together a list of famous people to invite. There’ll be a post entitled “Famous People Weigh In” that I’ll publish between December 1st and December 15th, the official blogathon dates. To participate, please comment / link back briefly to this article with the words “I’m In” or whatever else you might want to say, then look for that post “Famous People Weigh In” and please comment / link to that and write a longer comment or article on whatever you feel like.

So here’s my list of Famous People who are cordially invited to participate in this year’s Blogathon for Hunger. For more details, see the Stealable Flier and the Background Info.

This list will be built in real time. If you’re not on it, please accept my apologies and post an “I want in” comment, and chances are if you’re not a splogger I’ll add you in.

On To The List

Dustin Luther of Rain City Guide.

Kris and Steve Berg at the San Diego Home Blog.

Jim Cronin at The Real Estate Tomato.

Jay Thompson, aka The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, and (also from the toasty state), John L. Wake from the Arizona Real Estate Notebook.

Gary and Laury Woods at Beautiful Santa Barbara.

Fraser Beach at Toronto Real Estate Blog.

Rowena and More Likely Fran at The Real Estate Blog.

Fran Bailey in Windy City’s Chicago Metro Area Real Estate.

The especially famous Hanin Levin at Growabrain.

Don’t forget to Ask Merv (Forney in Northern Virginia).

The easy to pronounce Keith Byrd in the somewhat tongue twisting San Luis Obispo.

All you guys over at ActiveRain.

Peter Scott, the King of Carmichael.

Julie and Mike Jalone at Keep it Real.

Doug Lindstrom, owner operator of The Purple Cow, who recently was kind enough to associate me.

Dmitry and Maureen.

Bloggers, this year we’re promoting a 2006 Blogathon for Hunger in our local communities, and here is a draft version of the flier in Word Format and PDF Format.  You can help us out by sponsoring us or linking to us to spread the word, but you are also welcome to steal this flier and use it to host a local blogathon for hunger this holiday season in your own area.  All we ask is that you make sure you don’t leave in our company information and especially not our fax number on the flier — we don’t want to administer your pledges for you.  Other than that, a link is always friendly but we don’t insist on it.

Earlier this year on my Oakland site, I tried my hand at doing a little fundraiser called “Blogathon for Hunger 2006“. This was inspired by the official 2006 Blogathon, which I thought was a really clever and well-meaning idea but whose entry date I missed.

My own Oakland Blogathon for Hunger was a lot of fun, and it got me to do two things that are important to me that I don’t always do:

1. Write a bunch of stuff on one of my web sites in a very short time.
2. Help some people who are less fortunate than myself.

This Fall as this El Dorado and Amador County site took off a few things became apparent to me all at once, leading me to think it would be a good idea to resurrect the Blogathon for Hunger for a December run in El Dorado and Amador County.

1. My daughter Helen was several hours behind on her community service obligation for Shenandoah High School. I thought the Blogathon would be a good way to catch her up and get her a chance to participate in the family business at the same time.
2. Thanksgiving was almost upon us — no wait, Thanksgiving just happened. There we were in the Winter holiday season, and the El Dorado County Association of Realtors® was no doubt in full swing on its yearly CanTree effort (See the PDF file, The Other Side of EDCAR for more information).
3. This web site was just starting to take off, and I needed to start getting as much published here as I could.
4. Our inventory of homes was getting fairly high, so I thought some of my colleagues might like an opportunity to contribute to the cause of hunger relief while at the same time getting some free exposure for their sellers’ listings.

So anyway, that’s how I ended up here, rather early in the morning on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, talking about the background of this year’s Fall and Winter edition of the Blogathon for Hunger, which I envision as being:

1. Better publicized than the summer effort, both online and through fliers distributed locally.
2. Lasting from December 1st to December 15th, 2006.
3. Having proceeds be equally and fully distributed to the El Dorado County Food Bank and the Amador County Food Bank. (See these and other members of the California Association of Food Banks.)
4. Having more bloggers (and more sponsors!) than just me.

So anyway, that’s a first post to kick things off.  Now to go make it happen…