Blogs open doors for collaboration
It doesn’t take a cyber village to design a dream vacation home or draft national legislation — but two recent collaborative blogging initiatives suggest that it helps.
On Oct. 28, cable’s DIY Network will give away the Blog Cabin it built with online input. Meanwhile, the staff of Sen. Dick Durbin, D.-Ill., is drafting a rural broadband access bill influenced by blog outreach sessions.
The Blog Cabin project kicked off in February at DIYnetwork.com. The idea was for readers to choose components of a dream vacation cottage through online polls while DIY talent blogged about the resulting reality show.
But the site took a more collaborative turn right away when commenters started agitating for a screened-in porch — something none of the proposed designs included.
The strong response surprised Ron Lubke, director of DIY network.com and one of the main Blog Cabin writers. Beyond hosting message boards, the site hadn’t launched many interactive projects and Lubke doubted it had enough users to support the initiative.
Even before participants posted some 2,000 comments, cast more than 4.2 million votes in Blog Cabin polls and submitted 3.2 million entries to win the hideaway in Tennessee’s Smokey Mountains, Lubke changed his mind.
“Users built their own collaborative community,” he said. “The porch was not in the original plan. But then everyone started saying, ‘You’re up in the mountains, you need a screened-in porch.’ We listened. Then they wanted to make the cabin as green as possible, so we worked as much of that in as we could.”
Online excitement translated to small-screen success. During its Aug. 16-Sept. 27 first run, “Blog Cabin” was DIY’s top-rated primetime program. It also scored the network’s best-ever August ratings, according to spokesman Gary McCormick.
The network is rerunning the show on Thursdays leading up to the giveaway, and DIY plans to build another Blog Cabin next year. Lubke already has asked readers to submit wish lists, which he hopes will include a hot tub.
Back on the legislative front, Sen. Durbin was so pleased with the results of his summer drafting sessions on liberal OpenLeft.com and conservative RedState.com that he seems ready to do it again.
“Most people feel that unless you can hire an expensive lobbyist, you can’t get to the table to write a bill,” he told the National Journal this month. “This is a ‘small d’ democratic approach… that we ought to try more and more.”
DIY’s Lubke and Durbin press secretary Joe Shoemaker offered the following tips for getting the most out of a collaborative blogging project:
“ “The first thing is to have fun with it” and engage the audience on a personal level, Lubke said. His posts included an account of getting his truck stuck in the cabin’s driveway when he took his new boss on a tour, for instance. And Durbin videotaped his online drafting sessions to show he was actually at the keyboard.
“ Kick-start the dialogue by asking participants lots of questions. “Don’t lecture to them like a preacher at the church,” Lubke said. “Give them a reason to come back.”
“ Showcase multiple voices. Several DIY staffers wrote Blog Cabin entries to give readers different perspectives on the project. “You wouldn’t want 40 writers on there, but get a wide variety,” Lubke said. Meanwhile, Durbin reached out to both left- and right-wing bloggers.
“ Realize that translating input into action will require lots of work — another reason to enlist multiple writers. “We had many, many more responses than we thought we were going to get,” Shoemaker said. In addition to wading through them, staffers followed up with participants to flesh out the most promising suggestions.
If the insular worlds of TV and D.C. can benefit from collaborative blog projects, chances are other groups will too.