Sherry Chandler

Picked up for Blogsday!

Woo Hoo! Break out the champagne! It’s a red-letter day.

Or, more accurately, Thursday will be a red letter day. Why?

Because some snippet of my June 6 post on D-Day will be read on Open Source’s Blogsday 2006 program.

What is Blogsday?

Based loosely on Bloomsday, which celebrates “Ulysses” as an evocation of the whole world in a single day (in Joyce’s case, June 16, 1904), the idea is create a mosaic portrait of our country from excerpts of blog posts written on the same day. (In our case this past Tuesday, June 6th.)

After assembling the excerpts we bring in two accomplished and agile actors to read them.

Open Source is one of my favorite media enterprises. Here’s how they describe themselves, from their About page:

Open Source is a conversation, four times a week on the radio and any time you like on the blog. We designed the show to invert the traditional relationship between broadcast and the web: we aren’t a public radio show with a web community, we’re a web community that produces a daily hour of radio.

This means that we rely on our listeners and readers — whom David Sifry calls “the people formerly known as your audience” to help us produce the show. At its most basic, we look for this production help in the comment threads of this website. Every time we have an idea for an hour of radio we post it to the site. That show may not go on the radio for another month, but we immediately start reading comments — suggestions for guests, questions for guests, suggestions for ways to frame the show or reading material — and following up on them.

You can listen to Open Source on a number of public radio stations around the country, by podcast, on XM satellite radio, streaming live at WBGH or KUOW2. Or you can go to the blog and listen to any of the past shows.

These Blogsday casts are very effective. I am doubly flattered this year because I was featured in last year’s cast too. If you’d like a preview, you can still hear that one at this link. My few seconds of fame come at minute 22:41, just before Juan Cole and James Wolcott.

To make this altogether better, that “exceptional writer” and my friend Jeff at Have Coffee Will Write has also been selected for Blogsday 2006.

I’ll have my ear glued to the speakers. I hope you’ll be there too.

Possibly related posts:

Blog’s Day

Spiegelman on the Reagan funeral

Kitschification at its most negative —

Calls from Home

Theme and Variation

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