Sharing the Wealth (of experience)
As I write this, the number of people signed up for SoFoBoMo 2009 is approaching 300.
It occurs to me that this year, some number of SoFoBoMoers (we need better word that than!) will have already done a book in a month (and thus have a wealth of experience from last year to share), and that an even bigger bunch will have no experience.
I really hope that the folks who were successful last year will make some serious effort to share their experience so that the newcomers can learn from the mistakes we all made (and laughed about) last year. One of the things I really liked about last year was that the whole thing had a strong community feel, and one way to preserve that into the future is to make a tradition of the more experienced folks being open and sharing their hard won bag of tips and tricks freely.
So, please – blog like crazy. And don’t forget to start blogging about it all BEFORE your official start day. If you’re pondering projects, share that thought process – there are a lot of first timers out there who are wondering how in the world they’re going to figure this stuff out. Every time you share a little bit of your process, you’re helping out people who are trying to find the trail. Blog early, blog often, and remember that just because it seems obvious to you (because you figured it out last year) it isn’t yet obvious to a whole lot of newcomers to SoFoBoMo!
Musings on Photography 
Some example InDesign templates would be nice. That would let folks start dropping images onto pages without having to spend a week figuring out the program.:-)
Or, for that matter, templates from a variety of authoring programs.
Finding actual SOFOBOMO posts is going to be a difficult troll through the plethora of blogs. We probably need some sort of directory for just these posts. Hey, more organizational work….
the blog aggregator pipe is still there for SoFoBoMo ( http://pipes.yahoo.com/gordonmcgregor/sofobomo )
It is not easily maintainable/ extendable. That should probably change this time around – even with the small number of participants last time, the effort of maintaining the blogroll in Yahoo’s graphical pipes interface was stupidly high. sofobomo.org has a list of blogs already, combining RSS feeds and filtering on SoFoBoMo tags from them shouldn’t be too hard a problem.
‘I really hope that the folks who were successful last year will make some serious effort to share their experience so that the newcomers can learn from the mistakes we all made (and laughed about) last year’
I’d like to hear from the folks who weren’t successful. There is probably more value in those stories, too.
For me, I have this feeling that it’s what I don’t see coming that will bite me hard. I know what I’m gonna shoot, I’m prepared to let go of my expectations for the result, so whatever I end up shooting will be good enough, I’ve set aside time for development and scanning, I’m upgrading some software to handle it, etc. i THINK I’m prepped. But I’m sure some people who failed last year thought they were prepped too, so I agree that hearing from people who stumbled would be useful.
I still think we need a forum to exchange ideas between us. Maybe you guys could create a Google or Yahoo group and send an invitation to join to those who sign up for SoFoBoMo. This way there would be actual interaction between us and not just idle chatter in individual blogs. United we stand, divided we sit š
A Flikr group would work well
I agree that a place to have discussions would be wonderful. While some of the photographic challenges I think I have a handle on, the whole ‘make a book’ thing I’m clueless.