The First Blog Herald Challenge

Perhaps we have more money then sense. Well we wish we did. However The Blog Herald has been inspired by Radio Free Blogistan to launch the first ever (and maybe even the last ever) Blog Herald Challenge. The first Blogger or web surfer to submit a reasonably sung version of “The Day the Blogging Died” by Christian Crumlish with appropriate background instrumentals (perhaps karaoke to Don McLean’s original), and who release it to the Blog Herald for promotion will receive a $20 USD direct donation. $20 USD may not sound much but it is just over $30 Australian Dollars ($40 AUD not that long ago), which is more than we pay for our hosting for the quarter. A quick $20. For the words and conditions read as follows:
Full story direct link
Submit Here
For those visiting the competition from a direct link to this posting check out www.blogherald.com for the latest Competition news, including our new entries.
LATEST: Competition won by Pete Hopkins. Thank you to everyone for their interest and support.

The words:
Reprinted from Radio Free Blogistan in compliance with their CC license.
The day the blogging died (Blogging Pie)
A long, long time ago
I can still remember
How those weblogs used to make me smile

And I knew if I had my chance
I could make the Googledance
And maybe Technorati for a while

September always made me shiver
My aggregator would deliver
Bad news in my newsfeed
I couldn’t take one more read

I can’t remember if I cried
When he cut me from his blogroll side
But something touched me deep inside
The day the blogging died

Refrain

And they were singing
Bye bye wiki necho or pie
Took my standard to a body
But the body had died

And the good ol’ boys
Drinking kool-aid and lies
Singing this is the day blogging died.

Verse 2

Did you write some shitty specs
Is the funk in RSS like sex
When it’s version 2.0?

Now do you believe strict XML
Will save us, how ’bout Jon Udell?
And can you teach me
To install slashcode?

Well I know that you love Six Apart
But I still can’t tell their pix apart
You’re changing hosts again
Man I dig that Mena and Ben

I was a middle-aging writer hack
With a fast connection and a Powermac
But I knew I had popped the stack
The day the blogging died, I started singing

Refrain

Verse 3

Now for ten years we’ve been on the web
The pings to weblogs never ebb
But that’s not how it’s gonna be

When the Journals come from AOL
With their instant buddy chatroom hell
And a voice that came from you and me

The BigCos all were too distracted
Their CMSes got impacted
The ROI was burned
No sunk costs were returned

And while Lessig read the prior art
Salam Pax posted in the dark
And we remembered Xerox PARC
The day the blogging died, we were singin’

Refrain

Verse 4

Metafilter’s interface like gopher
With a filler thread from a jaded poster
Daypop Top and fallin’ fast

Extensible is just a notion
The players tried for some forward motion
With Pirillo on the sidelines with his chest

The war blog line got stale and old
While Gawker played a snarky role
We all got options then
But we never cashed them in

The VCs tried to take the yield
Installed-base churn did not congeal
Do you recall what extensive usability, quality assurance, and user-acceptance testing revealed
The day the blogging died? we started singin’

Refrain

Verse 5

And there we were all on one net
Three generations lost to debt
With new startups to start again

So, come on Marc be nimble, Dave be quick
Meg where’s Lafayette, hey Nick?
‘Cause Pyra gets the only BlogIt button

And as I watched the TypePad splash
I hoped they had sufficient cash
No business model yet
Makes hosting a safe bet

And as the flames lit up the blogosphere
Chris Lydon lent a kindly ear
I saw RageBoy laughing without fear
The day the blogging died, he was singin’,

Refrain

Verse 6

I met this person, Burningbird,
And I asked her for an ontologically meaningful word
But she just smiled and made a sound

I went down to the Scripting News
Where some years before I’d seen the clues
But the server said the file wasn’t found

In LiveJournals children screamed,
The lovers cried and the poets dreamed
But not a word was trusted
The permalinks were busted

And the three men I admire most
Phil Wolff, Mark Pilgrim, and Steve Yost
Kept editing their final post
The day the blogging died
And they were singin’ …

Refrain
Repeat Refrain

Conditions:
To win the $20 USD you must provide The Blog Herald with an audio file playable on PC (mpg or the like), and it must be of reasonable quality. By submitting the file you give permission for The Blog Herald to publish your work without restriction. Entries close 30 August unless extended. The wording of the song remains Copyright Christian Crumlish and the Instrumentals Don McLean. All published copies will be provided attribution to the authors and no profit will be raised from their publication.

Update: a few changes to the promotion, give the interest it has raised if we receive more than one entry we might go for a month long poll or the like. Our thanks to BoingBoing and other friendly sites for your promotion.