It’s now EIGHT years ago that Denise Nesbitt from across the pond in England created a meme called ABC Wednesday. People, literally from around the world, post an item – pictures, poems, essays – that in some way describe each letter of the alphabet, in turn. I’ve been participating since the letter K in Round 5.
Denise recruited a team of her followers to do some of the intro writing and visiting, which eventually included me because doing it all was too exhausting.
Three years ago, she ceded the role of administrator to me. This means that I assign who reads which posts, making sure somebody is writing the introductions (and writing them myself, when necessary) and inserting the link that allows everyone to participate.
The Netiquette for the site is this:
1. Post something on your non-commercial blog/webpage having something to do with the letter of the week. Use your imagination. Put a link to ABC Wednesday in your post and/or put up the logo.
2. Come to the ABC Wednesday site and link the SPECIFIC link to the Linky thing. It’ll be available around 4 p.m., Greenwich Mean Time each Tuesday, which is 11 a.m. or noon in the Eastern part of the United States.
3. Try and visit at least 5 other participants, and comment on their posts. The more sites you do visit, the more comments you will probably get.
Now, as the cliché goes, all good things must come to an end, and Denise and Roger have decided that ABC Wednesday should conclude, for a variety of reasons. The good news is that it won’t be until the end of Round 20, or four more trips through the alphabet.
We have discovered that there are folks who participate in a round, then drop out for a bit. Others start a round, but don’t complete. We think this will be an opportunity to invite those folks to participate once again.
Or maybe you have friends who have THOUGHT about tying ABC Wednesday but have not. THIS would be a good time to start.
Here’s a deep, dark secret: you don’t HAVE to participate every week. I think it’s advantageous to do so – it generates a lot of comments for me, but then again, I visit practically everyone who posts.
Bloggers, consider giving ABC Wednesday a try, if this sounds interesting. The A comes up the week of July 13, so you have some time to think about it. Write to me a rogerogreen (AT) gmail (DOT) com for more details.
Honestly, the main problem I had with ABCW was reading the other posts, but not because it was time consuming (though sometimes it was), but mainly because of people who use Blogger’s built-in commenting system (which most people do). If I left a comment, it included a link to my Google+ profile, which has very little to do with my blog. I finally worked out that I needed to share the post on Google+ so that other people could find it, but that’s convoluted, and very indirect.
You know about the commenting problems I had on my blog until I fixed a few things, but even then I sometimes had trouble finding the posts of people who commented on my posts.
Maybe you could actively encourage participants to leave a link to their posts in their comments on those 5 posts they visit? I know some people do that already, and toward the end of my participation in the last round, I did that, too (mostly on Blogger posts), but it just felt a little crass and overly self-promotional. Some sort of official imprimatur would help that, I think.
This is true: there were a couple people who were on the team that would poiunt out the more commercial sites and delete them. Now there’s really only one (Reader wil) and I’d have to do it all myself – contacting and deleting.
This is also true: Blogger makes it more difficult to comment. Some have the check mark, but occasionally there’s those folk who require checking food pictures. Ugh.