This year, Blog Action Day is on October 16, which coincides with World Food Day, so the 2011 theme is, quite naturally food. Since its inception in 2007, Blog Action Day themes have included water in 2010 and climate change in 2009. This year, in the short span of just two weeks approximately 1,500 bloggers from 80 countries registered to take part in Blog Action Day, 2011. Because of World Food Day, for Blog Action Day 2011, some bloggers are focusing on devastating famines, while others are addressing the abundance of food that is causing new health problems in the western world.
Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day. The aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion around an important issue that impacts us all.
The thousands of bloggers addressing the same issue on the same day changes the conversation on the web and focuses audiences around the globe on that issue. Out of this discussion naturally flow ideas, advice, plans, and action.
On the first Blog Action Day in 2007, thousands of bloggers to wrote about the issue of Environment. Thousands of bloggers ran environmental experiments, detailed innovative ideas on creating sustainable practices, and focused on organizations and companies that promote green agendas.
In 2008, Blog Action Day covered the theme of poverty, and similarly focused the blogging community’s energies around discussing the wide breadth of the issue from many perspectives and identifying innovative and unexpected solutions.
In 2009, the conversation around climate change brought together voices around the globe to discuss an issue that threatens us all and mobilized tens of thousands of people to get more involved in the movement for a more sustainable future.
Last year, with the theme of Water, we saw 5,600 bloggers from 143 countries, reaching more than 40 million readers with discussions a broad range of water issues, from river conservation, to the ethics of bottled water, to the increasing privatisation of water access, to the water crisis in Africa, all eager to shed light on this often-overlooked topic.
© 2011, Richard Matthews. All rights reserved.
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The F Word: Famine is the Real Obscenity
