Casita Gaia is organizing a Blog Carnival on August 20th through August 31st (Tucson’s Official Birthday: August 20, 1775) to celebrate the wonderful community that is Tucson, if you don’t know what a blog carnival is, or blog-a-rama as I like to think of it, just keep reading. The nuts and bolts of it are: have something to say about the wonderful community that is Tucson. Write it up. Set it to post on the Between August 19th and the end of August. Post a badge. Send me the info. Detailed instructions and background follow for those of you who like instructions – Me? Well, I never read instructions, I just dive in.

How to Blog Tucson’s Birthday Celebration

To Participate in Celebrate Tucson’s Birthday Blog Carnival :

I. Grab the code from the sidebar. The code can be found in the form box under the colorful badge in the left sidebar. Copy that code and put it in your blog ( a text / HTML sidebar widget works well) to let your readers know you will be participating in Celebrate Tucson’s Birthday Blog Carnival.
II. Send an email to let me know that you will participate. Send it to: nfhill (at) mac (dot) com and set the Subject Line to read: Blog Tucson’s Birthday. In the email, please include:

your name and contact info so that I can get in touch with you if needed. I will not share it with anyone!
the name or blogonym you will use to publish the piece on your site
your site’s name
your site’s URL
the URL to the post

III.   As soon as your post is written, and scheduled for publication between August 19th and 31st, please let me know. At that point I will publish non-linked Blog Titles here on a Participants Post.
IV.   Be sure to have your blog post set to publish at 4 a.m. Tucson-time on August 20th. (We get up early around these here parts to get the day started before the heat hits.) Once we have visited your blog and verified the post, we will have a link go live on this site. (Actually and you know you want to know this is to accomodate those Right Coasters, Back Easters who forget that when they are having an early lunch we may just be having our first cup of coffee and “No, we did not forget that we agreed to call so and so in the morning which lasts until 3 p.m. for them in order to accommodate us. Yes, right, like they ever do this. Sigh.)
V. Include a sentence in your email giving permission for me to excerpt your post and a link to the rest of your post on your site.
VI.   If, additionally, you wish to be included in the batch of blog entries from which Tucson’s Birthday will choose from for possible re-publication, say so and please send me a complete copy of the post, a statement authorizing re-publication, so I can forward them to the Tucson’s Birthday blog by August 20th. They may republish one or two submissions or all of them. It is up to them. I am just holding this as a cyber-neighborhood celebration, and Tucson’s Birthday likes the idea.
VII. Blog posts should be:

your own writing
be appropriate for a general audience
cover a positive aspect of the Tucson experience and community from a resident, visitor, or friend of Tucson perspective

VIII. If you do not have a blog, we will have a place for non-bloggers to share too. Just follow all the instructions above that apply to you and email your written piece to me.
IX. Be sure to give me the best email address to reach you so I can send a reminder out a few days before the event that you will actually see.
X. Don’t forget to tweet this if you are on Twitter. Use following hashtag: #blogtucson

Why Do This?

Tucson is an amazing place!
There have been people living here for 13,000 years making it one of the oldest known communities in the Americas!
We are “officially” a year older than the United States!
Tucsonans love their city!
Hundreds of thousands of people who don’t even call Tucson home, love Tucson!
Tucson is a creative city with an active population engaged in cutting edge online communication, business and art.
August is Monsoon Season so Tucsonans are occasionally inside to blog and read blogs.
Tucson has been through a lot this year and we want and need to celebrate all that is good about Tucson.
Tucson has been through a lot this year and we want to celebrate and even show off the fact that we are a loving and supportive community.
Your very own personal and wonderful reason.

Background Info

The Original Cyber Gathering
I found out about Tucson’s Birthday from a Tweet I received from Linda Ray a couple years back. She found out about my love of all things cyber on Twitter® and was interested in finding out more about Second Life® and expanding coverage of Tucson’s Birthday festivities into the virtual world. Linda and I worked our avatar’s butts off creating a celebration of Tucson’s Birthday in Second Life. It met with moderate success. We learned a bunch and I planned to improve on the virtual celebration the next year. Life got incredibly complicated last year, as did Second Life with ever increasing fees and constant changes to structure and interface. The 2010 virtual world celebration did not come together.
Celebrate the Tucson Community
This year, starting on January 8th, I began to want to do something more concrete to celebrate our community and help build community, so I revamped this site that had been associated with my virtual world business called Casita Gaia to be about local sustainable economies and the wonderful people, ideas, innovations, and businesses that are the very heart and soul of Tucson! I have lots of features I’m building, but for right now I’m keeping it small and manageable. But I figured since I’ve been blogging a bunch, a blog-a-thon, blog-a-rama, blog carnival would be a good way to highlight the cyber-riffic community that is Tucson. I will write about my own special reasons for doing this in a separate post.
Blogging
I attended BlogHer Entrepreneurs and Technology conference this spring to learn more about technology and how to build an entrepreneurial cyber venture. I’m still figuring that out. It is a big figure. I will be promoting this event at BlogHer ’11 from August 4-6 in order to give any interested residents, visitors, or just friends of Tucson at BlogHer a chance to participate.
Cyber Inspiration

Thanks to The Little Hen House for the tutorial on making a badge or button with a grab a code box.
Badge was created by N. F. Hill using one quail graphic from the Tucson’s Birthday resource page.
Thanks to Becca of Our Crazy Boys, Suzi of The Burrow Suzi, and Tami of What Tami Said, and Ginny, my dear friend who doesn’t even have a blog, for being the amorphous but specific catalyst that made me realize that Linda &/of Tucson’s Birthday would love this event and that this was a small thing I could do to celebrate and thank Tucson my home of 22 years.

Thank You!

Thank you for participating in whatever way you can. This is what makes Tucson a special and exemplary place. As someone said, “Together we Thrive.”
Peace and Blessings,
Nancy
N. F. Hill
Casita Gaia Editor & Publisher

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