Want to contribute to the Unconsumption Tumblr? (Or wiki?)

As many of you already know, the Unconsumption Tumblr is a team effort involving several volunteer contributors. There’s me, of course, but also Steve Chaney, Tom Hosford, and Brian W. Jones. Two of the other participants, Amy Shaw and Andrew Whitelaw, had to drop out a few months back (which is totally understandable — everybody has a lot to do), and I’ve been meaning for a while to offer an invitation here:

If you know/like the Unconsumption Tumblr and want to join the team of contributors, drop me a line. Part of what makes the project fun for me isn’t just having yet another venue to put stuff out there, but also being surprised by what others find/encounter/post. I’d particularly love to hear from anybody who stays on top of the various eco blogs better than I do. (Side comment: For a visual taste of what we’ve been posting over the past year or so, check out using this Tumblr mosaic-viewer link. That’s a tool I just learned about this morning — very cool!)

On a related note, I’ve also been meaning to put out an open call for help on the related Unconsumption Wiki — that could definitely use some oversight and involvement by somebody with much better social-media-fu than I personally possess. We’ve had a bunch of people sign up (30 or 40 I think) but only a handful have contributed so far. So, yeah, some help there would be great if you have ideas.

–> If you’re interested in either please drop me a line at murketing [AT] robwalker [DOT] net. (It may take me a day or two to respond, but I will.)

In general the Tumblr links to and highlights stuff we find interesting, useful, admirable, or provocative, that’s somehow related to the unconsumption idea. Part of being a contributor is helping shape what that means, and where it goes. For those of you not familiar with this idea, here’s a quick recap of Unconsumption:

The term first appeared, on this site, on December 6, 2006 in a post headlined “Unconsumption.” [1. You may have seen the unconsumption tumblr blog referred to as “unconsumption.com.” And then if you went to unconsumption.com you found it was a parked GoDaddy page. What gives? Well, here’s the deal. According to Whois, somebody named Mark Sherwood bought the domain unconsumption.com on December 9, 2006. (And somebody named David Komurek bought the domain unconsumption.net on February 2, 2008. Whois has not been able to tell me who owns unconsumption.org.) I’ve never pursued this by contacting these folks, so I don’t know if they plan to do something with the URLs or not.] PSFK picked up on that at the time. I subsequently used the term as a key part of a look at Freecycle in my NYT Consumed column, in January 2007.

Steve Portigal (who helped me with a great interview for that column) did a cool presentation about unconsumption in February 2007. I subsequently posted a lot about the notion here on Murketing.com, and eventually gave it its own page (which eventually became the basis for the aforementioned wiki). The Unconsumption Tumblr launched in early 2009. I was interviewed about that on New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth, and by Celsius.com (and maybe others I’ve forgotten), and Amy Shaw talked about it in this interview with Design Evolution. More takes: Eyecube wrote about it, as did the the always-impressive Core77, and the amazingly great Everydaytrash blog, the mighty Consumerist, and various Googleable others. Also my Times Magazine colleague Virginia Heffernan later mentioned the project in the sidebar to her column, here.

Most recently, unconsumption was trend-spotted and discussed at SXSW.

And that’s about it! But any questions, let me know.