I blogged recently about my effort to raise funds for MS research by taking part in the MS Walk and Fun Run here in Sydney. Thanks to a great deal of support from friends, family and workmates I’ve managed to raise a decent amount of money for this great cause.
The people from MS Australia rang me recently to ask if I’d be prepared to do an interview with the local newspaper to help promote the event and naturally I said yes. So one of the journos from my local paper rang me at work the other day to ask a few questions, and organise a photographer to come by my house.
The angle I suggested to the journo was that I was really impressed by the online tools provided by MS Australia, such as the fundraising websites that are created when you register for the event, and that one of the reasons I have been able to raise as much as I have was due to the connections and tools that the Internet enables. I pointed out that many of my friends and aquaintances from the Blogosphere have been responsible for a lot of the support I’ve received so far and so a good angle on the story was how technology can be an enabler that lets us be more effective. I suppose they hinted at this angle in the article, but it’s pretty tenuous. Anyway, that was the general idea I was suggesting.
My local paper is caller The Leader, and although they do a fairly good job of reporting local news, they have a habit of sometimes only getting the facts close-to-correct (and hence are sometimes referred to as The Mis-Leader). So in the interests of more accurate journalism, I just wanted to correct a few almost-facts…
1) It was my friend’s mum, not my mum’s friend, but yes I really do have a friend whose mother died of MS. However, it was a very long time ago, not just “a few years”… it was more like 20+ years. That friend made a very generous sponsorship of this event, so I just wanted to set that fact right out of respect for his mum.
2) The people from Canada and Chicago who sponsored me are very dear friends, and not “strangers”, as the article suggests. Yes I did get support from a number of people who I have never met other than through the blogosphere, but my North American connections are certainly not strangers.
And the address for my sponsorship page is http://sydney.mswalk.org.au/?betchaboy if you still want to help me hit my goal of $2000. 🙂 I’m pretty close!!
At the IWB Conference on the Gold Coast today I met up with a bunch of teachers from the OzTeachers mailing list community, many of whom I have known for years but only met this weekend for the first time. What an interesting world we live in… we rounded up as many of them as we could to pose for a group photo in from of Bryn Jones’ infamous “iVan”.
