How did all this get started?
In the summer of 2000, blogger Cat Connor decided that a free weekend could be combined with a marathon session of insomnia to have some fun with her personal website. In fact, Cat decided to update frytopia every 15 minutes for an entire 24 hours, for a total of 96 posts over the course of a single day.
Armed only with a stack of movies and a case of Mountain Dew, Cat plunged headfirst into a day's worth of blogging and wound up surviving it well enough -- even earning some notoriety among her blogging associates along the way.
Along with her newfound attention, Cat came to a realization: staying up all night to update her website could represent a lot more than a caffeine-and-cinema-drenched exercise in butt-numbness. Or, in the more eloquent words of Cat herself, "I've always felt the best thing about the web was its ability to affect the real world. The web can be a major force for good."
Thus, Blogathon was born. The first annual event occurred in 2001, when Cat invited friends and other bloggers to join her in her sleepless marathon. Over a hundred participants stayed awake on July 28 and 29, some doing so in spectacular fashion: there were virtual mix tapes, physical collages, shoes aplenty, and even dreams for the sleepy. Altogether, bloggers raised over $20,000 for 77 different charities in 2001 and garnered even more attention than Cat had on her own the year before, prompting her to confirm Blogathon's perennial nature: 2001's success outstripped all my expectations, so we're here for good."
For 2002, Cat put together a team to help her build on that success, and get even more people involved. "Creating an international community over the course of 24 hours--one with a single purpose--is something that can only happen on the web. It makes the web magical. I'd love to see it become absolutely huge, though I admit I'm a little intimidated by it as well," she said.
The second annual event saw the inclusion of highlighted charities, a automated backend for the Blogathon site, and even more gimmicks ranging from posting in Haiku, to uploading a retrospective biography via photographs, to writing a novel. The number of bloggers more than doubled, and the event raised over $50,000 charities around the world.
Numbers again doubled in 2003, with over $100,000 raised for charity. 2004 saw a break for the official Blogathon, with Project-Blog taking over for a year. in 2005, staff from previous Blogathons took over, bringing in over $58,000.
This year, the original administrator, Cat Connor, has returned. She's brought Rob Drimmie, her programmer from '02, and Sheana Director, who handled the event in '05. Together, they hope to create an innovative, fun event that raises a boat load of cash for charity worldwide.