A couple weeks ago I stood up in front of a whole bunch of people and explained that I was a failure. I told the story of how one of my online projects had been a complete, total, and epic failure. Is it counterintuitive to expose your mistakes? To be certain.

People like to be celebrated–and I’m no different–so the very idea of “outing” yourself as a failure all seems, at first glance, to be crazy. But think about how all successful communities feature some element of sharing success and failure.

Unlike religious communities, we don’t have high holy days to gather around. Unlike cultural communities, we don’t have a common food, dance, or art to flock to. Unlike geographic communities, we don’t have a physical space we commonly use.

Online people communicate in many spaces. I use my WordPress blog here, my Twitter, and my Facebook as my three main digital rooms. Others prefer more gated and adaptable communities like Ning or stick-with-what-they-know-music-loving-MySpace.

In the physical space the so-called “social media community” has serialized events or one-off fundraisers. DemoCamp, BarCamp, ChangeCamp, Ignite, Social Media Breakfast, Third Tuesday, Social Media Book Club, TEDx, PodCamp, Twestival, and a whole host of others.

None of these spaces lend themselves to the natural airing of failures at the “actual” level rather than the theoretical or “ideas” level. Which is to say,  a group of action-oriented individuals saw a gap in the Ottawa event-market. A place for informal, serious, yet lighthearted examinations of online communications case studies.

Case Study Jam is the creation of a group of core “doers” in Ottawa, as they call themselves. These are people you see online everyday and attending  tech and “social media community” events.

I was pleased to be able to have a venue to get my personal online communications failure on the table.

The DailyBlogPost account came about as a “free idea” from Julien Smith, the Montreal-based podcaster and co-author of Trust Agents. So, I thought – great idea! I’ll register the account. Everything after that went awry. It became a chore, there was no feedback from people, community didn’t gather around this one-tweet-a-day account. In short, the idea had a kernel of good, my execution was what was wrong.

Here is how I heralded its arrival on my blog.

The short take on my personal FAIL:

• DailyBlogPost was a very bad attempt at a Twitter account.
• Being inspired by Internet superstar Julien Smith didn’t mean guaranteed success.
• I broke every rule I had learned with my personal Twitter account.
• I gave up. Thirty tweets in; I plum didn’t care anymore. Bad attitude.

You can listen to my whole presentation here (I think I was channeling @Julien that night; my presentations are usually more PG) and read the recap of the whole night lovingly crafted by the team at Case Study Jam.

Also, @DailyBlogPost is up for free again. Want to take it on? Fix my mistakes? Comment below (or just comment to add ridicule and scorn).