The Scottish Football Blogathon

I was ruminating on Twitter last night about the Scottish Football Blog approaching twin milestones.

The blog is closing in on 1000 posts and its fifth birthday.

How to celebrate? The idea of Jimmy Boco appearing at a blog testimonial did appeal. But I'm fatter than Paul Kane and worse at football than Joe Tortolano so the opportunity for humiliation seems too great.

Then an idea appeared and developed from nowhere.

Welcome to the Scottish Football Blog "Blogathon."

The plans are in their infancy just now but here's a rough outline:

• 24 hours
• 24 blog posts
• Minimum 500 words per post
• Researched, written and posted within an hour
• All written by me

How do I verify that?

Here's where a couple of ideas from Twitter will come in handy:

• 12 of the posts will be based on suggestions from Twitter, from tweets received 15 minutes before the hour in question
• 12 of the posts will be "for" or "against" arguments written in response to posts submitted by other bloggers at the hour in question

In other words:

• The post written between 11am and noon will be based on a tweet sent in at 10:47am. It will be published at noon.
• The post written between noon and 1pm will be based on an article received from a fellow blogger at noon. It will be published at 1pm

Obviously the other bloggers will have as long as they want to prepare their article but they will be able to verify that I had no prior knowledge of it.

Similarly, ideas submitted by tweets will be selected at random and the chosen Twitter-er will be able to verify that they hadn't given me advance warning.

In the excited first flush of its conception this idea is sounding more complicated than it should. But it will become clearer.

Basically it's this: a minimum of 12,000 (original) words on 24 football related topics written in 24 hours. Easy.

Other ideas I've received suggest that subjects inspired by Twitter could be chosen by the number of retweets an idea receives.

Or that some sort of prize might be given to the blogger whose "for" and "against" post receives the most hits on the day.

It will be for charity. The Homeless World Cup and Alzheimer Scotland will benefit. I'll explain my reasons for those choices as we move closer to the date.

That date, incidentally, is Saturday 19th November starting at 2pm and running through until 2pm on Sunday 20th November.

So that's the plan. I'm a procrastinator by my plodding nature. This has now been announced. I'm going to have to do it.

More details will follow.

In the meantime you can follow the newly minted Twitter hashtag #fitbablether for the latest.