The Video Will Live Here From Now On

The Madman Has Escaped

If for any reason you should find yourself in Japan over the next few days, you can catch an exhibition by the photographer for I Wrote This For You, the enigmatic Jon Ellis. Click on the pic for details.

Caption Contest Round 2

[Edit: We'll be running these every Friday with the winners announced on Monday, here]

Dear You,

Some of you might remember the caption contest we ran here a while ago. It was pretty successful but unfortunately, time-consuming for me to go through all the captions, some of which were more than a page long. That took me a day or two. I don’t often have a spare day or two.

So, because I'd love to get you more involved, we’re trying it out on twitter and facebook.

Here’s how it works.

The picture we’ll be using is today’s, which you can see at the top of I Wrote This For You, here www.pleasefindthis.blogspot.com

If you’d like to enter a caption, tweet it with the hashtag #pleasefindthis

You don’t need to be following me or tweet it at me, just use the hashtag.

Using twitter means it’s easier for me to go through the entries (because all the entries are short and let’s be honest, a lot of the time the short ones are the best ones) and my mailbox doesn’t explode.

On Sunday, I’ll go through the entries on twitter, choose the best one, put it with the picture on www.someonefoundthis.blogspot.com and everyone who wants to see what else was entered can easily just click on the hashtag and see for themselves.

If it works today, we’ll try it out again tomorrow.

Best of luck and all my love,

Me

PS. If you’re not on twitter, you can still enter on facebook using your status update, just keep it short and type “@I Wrote This For You” at the end of it, which will make it easier to manage because it’ll appear in the facebook group here

PPS. Just make sure you type "@I Wrote This For You" with capitals like that and no full stop, apparently I've inspired a band or something.

PPPS. I really hope your holidays went well, mine were amazing but, I did miss you and it's good to be back <3>

I Wrote These Legal Issues For You

There aren’t any legal issues with I Wrote This For You. Neither Jon nor I mind if you copy our content across to your own blog, tumblr, twitter feed, whatever. That’s fine.

What upsets me is identity theft and intellectual property theft. Here’s the fine line.

Scenario 1.

You find the blog, you enjoy it, you want to share it with your friends. You post the line, or the picture and the line and a link back.

Perfect. More people are exposed to our work, you’re the one that discovered it, everyone involved is happy.

Scenario 2.

You find the blog, you enjoy it, you want to share it with your friends. You start a blog with the same name as mine, pretend to be me and then repost my content as your own.

The only person who’s happy in this situation, is you.

Why, I have no idea as I’ve never felt any sense of accomplishment for something I didn’t do.

You’re more than welcome to start a blog based on mine. You’re more than welcome to put my content anywhere you want. But please acknowledge the source.

There’s a story about Pablo Picasso that I really enjoy. It goes something like this.

Picasso was dining at a fancy restaurant in New York. A fan feeling prominent enough to introduce herself to Picasso did exactly that. Blah blah blah blah blah, how the socialite loved his work, how thrilled she was to meet him, how exciting to converse with a legendary painter. Mr Picasso's polite acceptance encouraged the fan to ask if Mr. Picasso could draw her a sketch. While waiters were passing sorbets and parfaits, Mr. Picasso did exactly that: he grabbed a napkin, a pencil and started a quick sketch

As the woman grabbed for the napkin, Mr. Picasso said "Madame, that will be 10000 USD". The women reacted in a shock "but that took you only a few minutes!". "No Madame" replied Pablo Picasso "It took me 50 years".

It’s taken me 29 years to write this for you. Please respect that.

Thank you.

Haiti

Dear You,

More than 100,000 Haitians are dead and many more are injured and in desperate need of medical attention.

You can read more here.

If you can help, text "Haiti" to 90999 to donate $10.

100% of your donation passes through to the Red Cross, which you can follow on twitter at @RedCross for Haiti relief. Your cell carrier keeps nothing.

You can also donate to the International Response Fund at http://www.redcross.org

Love,

Me

I Wrote This For You On Your Phone

You can now follow I Wrote This For You on your mobile phone. I'll be reissuing the entire original archives from three years ago, one day at a time from here.

Presents In January

Dear You,

Merry Thursday. Posting will recommence on the 11^th of January. Which is also the date this letter will disappear from the front page of www.pleasefindthis.blogspot.com

There’s something incredibly familiar and comforting about seeing words appearing one after the other on my screen after so long.

First, here are some gifts.

Remember that song that Dan recorded last year? The Time It Takes To Fall? Well, as a present from Dan and I, here’s an mp3 of the recording that you can put on your iPod or music player of choice.

Leah threw this together, which you can use as a banner on the side of your page (just copy and paste the code). And, of course, if you use it and send me your blog address either here or on twitter @pleasefindthis, I’ll link to you from the news website for I Wrote This For You, astrangelinkonthesideofthepage.blogspot.com in the Friends Of pleasefindthis section.

I decide to do this now in January because there are already enough presents in December.

Which is also the month that the winner of the Open Web Awards was announced.

It wasn’t me.

I know I bugged the hell out of you to vote for me and I got really hung up on how important it all was which lead to what I can now only describe as a rush of blood to the head and my previous two long winded letters to you.

That’s the problem with making something important. You stop having fun with it. You stop enjoying it.

And yet, today, now, in this moment, I am happy.

I’m happy because I got something so much more than an award. You honestly wouldn’t believe how many heart warming messages I received from people all over the world, about how I’d touched their lives or stories about a particular entry or simply reassuring me that what I did, mattered.

It was this amazing awakening for me. I’d started taking I Wrote This For You very seriously and in essence, started to treat it like work.

That’s not to say that it shouldn’t be taken seriously as a project, quite obviously many people, including myself, do.

But it should be love, not work, that drives it.

Hopefully 2010 will be a return to that principle. I know for a fact that it'll be a year filled with exciting things. I don't think of it as another chance. Because every moment is another chance.

See you on the 11^th,

Me

PS. I missed you <3>