Over the past month or so, I’ve become a huge fan of Clay Shirky. After finishing his new book Here Comes Everybody, I have to say that it’s quite possibly the most important activist-oriented book I’ve ever read. Buy a copy and if you don’t agree, feel free to send me hate mail. But I know you’ll be blown away.
Shirky’s book is selling like gangbusters, so I’m very pleased to say that he’s agreed to come on our VegTalk podcast later this month. If you want to get a taste of what he’s all about, check out the video of this fantastic seventeen minute talk he just gave.
Shirky has already impacted my work in a number of ways. My idea to start posting photos to Vegan.com came from reading Here Comes Everybody and realizing that there must be tons of people tagging their Flickr food photos as vegan. Why not tap into that disorganized yet highly focused energy and post the best of these photos to Vegan.com?
Similarly, we’re seeing that people are disgusted by the lack of accountability in slaughterhouses. So why not set up a Google Form and capture the complete contact info for everyone who wants to get webcams into slaughterhouses?
All of which brings me to my next Shirkyesque effort. One of my main reasons for bringing Dr. Fuhrman on this week’s podcast was to do a little experiment. I knew that many regular VegTalk listeners would find his work of interest. But the people who really need to listen to Fuhrman aren’t vegans with healthy diets — no, it’s the omnivores who eat like crap who really need to hear this message. And every single person who visits Vegan.com knows at least a dozen of these people!
So let’s try this quick and easy experiment and see what happens. Give five minutes to thinking about all the people in your life who have no interest in being vegan, but would likely be motivated to improve their diets. Write down the names of every one of these people and then send them an email with the following link to the Dr. Fuhrman podcast:
http://tinyurl.com/3zmztm
After you’ve done that, be in touch and let me know how it goes. I’m convinced that one thing vegans need to get better at is finding great information of interest to omnivores, and then taking a few minutes to get this information out to them. Give this a try with the people in your circle — it’s only a few minutes of your time, and the payoff could be enormous.
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