Please "like" this

I’ve had my Facebook account for about three years now, and for every party invitation received, every photo shared by a friend, and every chuckle I’ve had from a funny status update, I have received roughly the same amount of annoying requests to check out Zombie-Mafia-Vampire-Pirate-Ninja-Werewolf-Farmer applications. I “ignore”, I “block”, I “un-friend”, and Facebook life moves on.

So when I received an “America’s Anonymous Self Portrait” suggestion from my cousin Adam a few weeks ago, I clicked “ignore” and didn’t give it a second thought. Today I was looking at some of my cousin’s artwork on the Facebook and saw a link to that aforementioned suggestion, and this time I looked more closely at it. And I was impressed.

Adam has started a project of collecting anonymous self-portraits from anyone willing to contribute. Send in a self-portrait and Adam will post it and eventually maybe put together a website or publish a collection of the artwork. You don’t have to be a professional artist to partake; it’s more of a way to express who you are with a painting, drawing or doodle.

Adam admits that this isn’t an entirely new concept, but I still love this idea. It reminded me of the PostSecret idea (http://postsecret.blogspot.com/), which I also thought was a simple but wonderful idea. I just like that there are different ways of expressing one’s self, and that people are generally interested in what others are thinking, feeling and experiencing in this crazy world. There’s no reason why Adam’s project can’t be as successful as that one.

Well, okay, there might be one reason why it wouldn’t be as successful, and it’s exactly what I outlined above. “Ignore”. I got the page suggestion and I automatically clicked “ignore” because I don’t want be hassled into growing virtual corn on running virtual drug cartels. I’m sure that there are plenty of other folks out there that have been conditioned through Facebook to do the same thing. Which kind of sucks for Adam, because good ideas like this can get lost in all the crap out there.

On Facebook I am relatively unpopular with only 178 friends. Here on Blogspot I officially have 2 “followers”, and maybe a handful or two of loyal readers. But I feel like pointing this out in my blog might bring more actual interest to Adam’s project than if I send out 200 ignored page suggestions on Facebook. So check out the link below, where you can get more details on the project and see the first batch of submissions. If you like the concept, please “Like” the Facebook page. It’s still in the early stages, but hopefully it will gain more interest and take off.

http://www.facebook.com/#!/anonymous.selfportrait