“I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about Jeter.” Just kidding. The game we love, the players we hate, and more.
From Norman Mailer to Wendy Pepper — everything on film, TV, books, music, and snacks (shut up, raisins), plus the Girls’ Bike Club.
Helping public schools, winning prizes, sending a crazy lady in a tomato costume out in public.
Monologues, travelogues, fiction, and fart humor. And hens. Don’t forget the hens.
The Tomato Nation advice column addresses your questions on etiquette, grammar, romance, and pet misbehavior. Ask The Readers about books or fashion today!
Kudos for you guys from Jerry Yang’s blog, the Six Apart blog, and Federated Media. Well done, folks.
I’ve (re-)discovered a few things over the course of the recent Days Of Rage. Some of them are great!
I found it while researching a murder (…this is a sentence I have more frequent use for than most), the true story of a neighborhood legend from my childhood. I grew up in a leafy, …
Yay, us! How awesome is it that we raised nearly 25% of the total ourselves? So awesome!
Good job, everyone! We nearly swept the prizes for Sars! I don’t really understand how the Google one worked, but oh well. Yay, us!
I too am confused by this LitLiberation stuff. Where did this challenge even come from? Its never been on the leaderboards. Weird.
Oh well, we’re still undeniably awesome.
I sent an email to DonorsChoose, asking for clarification on how LitLiberation won the Google Award (and why TomatoNation didn’t). Here is the reply I received:
“LitLiberation won the Google Award because all the activity through the LitLiberation leaderboard ($139K) represents the efforts of one person, author Tim Ferriss, who put together LitLiberation as a way to get his network internally competing to raise funds for classroom projects. He came up with this leaderboard approach, but anyone is welcome to do the same (and will make this clearer next year, as this was the first time anyone proposed doing this). For example, next year, we could create a Tomato Nation leaderboard and Sarah Bunting’s readers/blogger friends could create their own challenge pages within that Tomato Nation leaderboard, and we would roll-up the resulting activity for purposes of the awards. In response to your email we have added some more language to the leaderboard text to highlight that LitLiberation was created by one person.”
I don’t entirely understand this, but I sent her a reply thanking her for the explanation, but suggesting that they make the contest rules clearer, because giving the win to LitLiberation seemed kind of wrong to me.
(I’m a lawyer, so I’m all about following the rules.)
The bottom line: Tomato Nation is the single-blog leader. You guys did that. No blog network; no TV show. You. You, Claire Danes, $ and the Dollarians, and I.
I salute Tim Ferriss’s efforts. A lot of classrooms will see the benefits, and that’s the point. But the TN readership is still responsible for, and I quote, “the largest philanthropic mobilization by a single blog (within a 1-month timeframe) in the history of the Internet.”
Print that.
“the largest philanthropic mobilization by a single blog (within a 1-month timeframe) in the history of the Internet.”
You guys, it cannot be said enough.
AWESOME.
Very nice mention in the Google blog, complete with video.
I owe Tomato Nation readers an apology. When Tim Ferriss asked if he could be credited for everything he generated through his LitLiberation leaderboard, we figured we should err on the side of flexibility since it could result in more resources for kids. I should have given you a heads up about his approach and was lulled into complacency by the fact that up until the last day of the contest, his leaderboard did not pose a threat to Tomato Nation. He basically pulled out all the stops in the last 24 hours of the contest. Bottom line, I screwed up by not alerting you to this other competitor.
Lesson learned for next year, when we’ll invite people to compete as a network/leaderboard or as a single blog/challenge from the beginning of the contest, and regularly alert participants to the performance of the network/leaderboard competitors.
Tim Ferriss’ LitLiberation *network* generated a fantastic $140K, but that doesn’t change the fact that Tomato Nation represents the largest philanthropic mobilization by a single blog (within a 1-month timeframe) in the history of the Internet. Knitters Without Borders (http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/tsffaq.html) seems to hold the network record, but Tomato Nation stands alone as the record holder for goodness done by one blog’s readership.
My colleagues and I are in absolute awe of TomatoNation. On behalf of 15,953, students, THANK YOU.
-Charles Best, founder, DonorsChoose.org
Sars,
You might want to give your awesome readers a heads-up to keep an eye out for any e-mails from Donor’s Choose–i just got one telling me that someone had given me a $100 thank-you Donor’s Choose gift certificate for taking part in the Blogger’s challenge. I have no idea who paid for it, or how many were given, but it just went to a proposal for sewing machines in upstate New York.
If all of your contributors get one, that’s another $100,000.
Mine was good until December 15th.