The Dublin Community Blog

I’ve been doing a little thinking about this blog over the past while, why I started it, where we’ve come from since those early days when I started it, 4 years ago today, where it’s going and how it can be used to do some more good.

The idea I had when starting the blog was to create a community resource, where people living in and around Dublin could contribute an interesting and relevant dialogue for people in and around Dublin (and beyond).

The highlight for us as a contributory team was obviously winning Best Group Blog at the 2009 Irish Blog Awards. But this blog wasn’t created to win awards (great and all as they are!), it was created to do something good.

Recently, as a team, we were provided by a PR agency a number of prizes to give to our readers and we have been debating amongst ourselves how best to distribute these prizes. We’ve had similar approaches in the past that we’ve knocked back as we didn’t know how best to distribute them. We’ve considered competitions, but have since come up with a better idea. Here goes:

We want to start a campaign to make Dublin smile. We hope that this campaign goes a little viral and gets some support from fellow blogs and also some more business around town.

The concept is relatively simple, we want people to do something good, at random and document this for us. Ideally if we can get photos or videos of you doing this, then all the better, but we want to hear your story of how you made someone smile first and foremost.

The main focus of this campaign is to look out for people in need. For example, if you see a homeless person on the street, stop, say hello and buy them a sandwich or a coffee. Get their name, tell us a bit of their story and your time with them, get a photo of you together and we send you a prize. Another example could be if you see someone unable to find change for a parking meter, put your hand in your pocket, give them the change if you have it and again, send us the story. It’s quite simple really. If we can get corporate Dublin involved in sending us some more gifts to assist this process, this thing could become a big success.

I’m really interested to see if people think that this could be a runner. We would really love to see other blogs get involved in this, touching up their corporate contacts and starting off a wider campaign to make Dublin and indeed the rest of the country smile.

Maybe we’re being over optimistic. Maybe people really aren’t interested in making others smile. But I, and the rest of the team here at Dublinblog.ie believe that we can at least start to make the world a little happier!