Ten days after the official launch, the instant success of our village community blog has surpassed all expectations. New posts are appearing at least twice a day, usually more (to say nothing of static pages on the rest of the site), and people have been quick to grasp the concept of leaving comments. We have received many e-mails from people both inside and outside the village, offering extra written and photographic content, or simply expressing their appreciation. Our initial editorial team of three will have expanded to six by the end of next week; we've been mentioned in one local magazine, and are getting whispers about possible coverage in a national magazine; and as for the visitor stats, we pulled in a whopping 429 page views on Tuesday alone.

(It took me about eighteen months of solid, regular blogging to achieve a similar figure on Troubled Diva, and yet the village blog has got there in less than two weeks. Which isn't bad going for a community with only 500 people on the electoral register.)

What I haven't yet explained is that there's a serious purpose behind all of this effort, which extends over and above the immediate benefits of providing an information service and community-building facility.

We are currently seeking funding for an ambitious yet necessary re-build of our memorial hall, and have already passed the first stage of the lottery bid, netting £23,350 in order to help us prepare for the next stage.

To support this application, as well as applications from other funding bodies, a lively and active blog provides demonstrable evidence of our strengths as an active community, that is capable of successfully organising itself. We also hope that it will help to attract commercial sponsors, who will see the benefits of being visibly associated with such a worthy initiative. Many companies set money aside to support projects in their area, and we hope that this will make us a particularly attractive box to tick.

It therefore helps our cause to have the blog being talked about, outside the immediate confines of the village - and we already know that this is starting to happen.

And of course, anything that you can do to help us along would be more than welcome...

Labels: blogs, community, derbyshire, linkage

Since the closure of our village shop at the end of February, weekends in the cottage have taken on a notably different complexion. Gone is the (relatively) early morning yomp through the village to pick up a newspaper, milk, bread, eggs and various other bits and bobs - indeed, gone is the very concept of a weekend newspaper. Gone is the opportunity to bump into friends and acquaintances on the street: exchanging pleasantries, catching up with news and gossip, making plans, extending impromptu invitations. (K's record for "popping out to get a paper" was a socially impressive 90 minutes.) And gone is our regular glimpse at the noticeboard outside the shop, with its various posters, announcements, adverts and miscellaneous pieces of information.

Although plans are well underway to set up a more modest retail venture inside the village pub, there is a subtle but distinct feeling that something significant has been lost. Suddenly, we feel slightly less like a self-sufficient community, and slightly more like a dependent satellite, a dormitory for commuters.

All of which makes the long-awaited launch of our village community blog all the more timely, and all the more significant. We have been planning it for months. There have been prototypes, presentations, strategy meetings, long discussions, calls for volunteers, feasibility studies, brainstorming sessions... why, I even broke a long-held personal rule, and put together a detailed presentation in (hack, spit) Powerpoint.

And now, finally, we have a site which is up and running, with a firm commitment from our team of three to keep it regularly updated. We may not be the first village community blog in the UK (I've found three, only one of which is currently active), but I can safely predict that we'll be the most successful in achieving our aims.

For any of you who have wondered exactly where K and I spend our weekends, the mystery is about to be lifted. Click on the screenshot to access the site...

Labels: blogs, community, cottage, derbyshire, linkage

Just under a year ago, I launched Shaggy Blog Stories: a blogging anthology which went on to sell over 500 copies, raising over £2000 for Comic Relief.

This year, Peach has picked up the baton, in the form of You're Not The Only One: a brand new blog-to-book project, with a brand new theme, a brand new editorial team, and a brand new charity.

The theme: You can basically write about anything you like, provided that it describes a personal experience. As Peach says:The team: Peach has recruited an all-female crew, consisting of herself, Ariel, Ms R, Sarah and Vi. However, just because the team is all-female, this doesn't mean that the contributors all have to be female. Indeed - and this is another change from Shaggy Blog Stories - you don't even have to be British.

The charity: Roughly £4.30 from every copy sold will be donated to WARCHILD.

The details: Full info can be found on Peach's site. If you're spreading the word, then please be sure to include the same link.

This should be an excellent project. Can't wait to see the finished article.

Labels: blogs, books, community, linkage

miketd: My inner thirteen-year old Gong fan is all of a-quiver, as I've bagged a last minute chat with Steve Hillage later today. Cosmic!
12:20 PM February 01, 2008 from web

miketd: Flipping heck, I've been blogrolled by Alison Moyet. (Oh come on, you LOVE it that I constantly name-drop. I do it for YOU, you know.)
01:28 PM February 01, 2008 from web

pal#1: @miketd: What a coincidence, only the other day Annie Lennox and I were discussing the impact of RSS/Atom feeds on traditional web stats.
02:17 PM February 01, 2008 from web in reply to miketd

pal#2: @miketd - I know! I got fanmail from 1980s TV presenter D****** D****** just the other day, asking advice on tip top blogging! Bless'em!
02:46 PM February 01, 2008 from web in reply to miketd

pal#3: @miketd. Never mind them. As I was telling Posh last night, they're just jealous.
10:03 AM February 01, 2008 from web in reply to miketd

pal#4: No Nelson, I will NOT promote your book 'Long Walk to Freedom' on my blog!!! Some people...!
03:03 PM February 01, 2008 from web

pal#2: @pal#3 - Yeah, David and the boys (Romeo etc) were saying you told her that over brunch. I said you were just trying to make her feel better.
03:09 PM February 01, 2008 from web in reply to pal#3

pal#1: @pal#2: You must have caught that cold from Brooklyn, he was really stuffed up the other day. Britney reckons Preston's got it too.
04:29 PM February 01, 2008 from web in reply to pal#2

Labels: celebs, community, twitter

I forgot to mention this at the time, but at the end of last year I handed over the day-to-day administration for Post of the Week to the estimable Ms. Peach. One of Peach's first acts on taking over was to extend the reach of the weekly voting: a splendid innovation, which means that everybody can now vote for their favourite five posts from the weekly shortlist.

Although time is almost up for this week's voting, I still thought it worth alerting you to the current shortlist, as it's one of the strongest selections in ages. Without wishing to sway the jury, my money's on A Large Number of Small Experiences: Race-day psychosis, which is (given my pathological disinterest in anything sports-related) a surpisingly gripping account of what it's like to take part in a competitive rowing event.

Labels: blogs, community, linkage, postoftheweek

2007 was probably the year that, following several years of exponential growth, the blogging phenomenon reached some sort of plateau. The word itself has now passed into common parlance, and the existence of blogs is no longer regarded as novel, unusual, mysterious, or otherwise worthy of comment. Finally - and not before time either - we have reached a stage where no-one is predicting that 2008 will be "The Year Of The Blog". At some point during 2007, the last ever "What IS Blogging?" think-piece must surely have been penned - and for that alone, we must all be truly grateful.

Because, you see, everyone's got them now. Not just the tech-head pioneers, or the "If it moves, link it!" first wave (*), or the "Today I had a cheese sandwich!" second wave, or the pundits, the politicos, the hobbyists, the special interest brigades, the amateur journalists, the "writerly" types and the "Seize the Marketing Opportunity and make $$$!" hucksters... but also, and in ever greater numbers: newspapers and periodicals, private companies and public organisations, international broadcasting empires, grassroots community projects, established professional writers, politicians, presenters, academics, high-falutin intellectuals and Z-list celebs alike.

Until quite recently, the statement "I am a blogger" implied membership of a particular community: relatively small in size, and largely (and to the outside world, somewhat bafflingly) self-referential in nature. Now, it means little more than "I have a computer, a way with words, and some spare time on my hands." Blogs have been normalised, integrated... and some disillusiuoned idealists might even say that they have been co-opted. For literally millions of people, they are just another part of everyday life.

For the faddists - the sort of people who hung out on Blogspot or Livejournal for a few months, setting up Tag Boards, joining web rings and endlessly posting the results of "What XXXX Are You?" quizzes before getting bored and moving on - Facebook is the new blogging. (We thought that Myspace was the new blogging, but little did we know what lurked around the corner, and how many more demographic boundaries were to be breached.) I'd wager that the broad majority of people reading this have set up Facebook profiles and are still active participants, and that an unshakeable minority have resolved never to go anywhere near the service. By this time next year, I'll wager that anyone who was ever likely to dabble with Facebook will have duly dabbled, that the honeymoon period will have ended, that the last "What IS Facebook and what does it SAY about us?" think-piece will have been written, and that a significant proportion of profiles will be lying dormant and abandoned. It will have been an altogether shorter cycle of Big Boom and Slow Fade, tied as it is to a single proprietary site, a more restrictive format, and an emphasis on minimum-effort, short-attention-span novelty - and by the same token, that's why the blogging plateau is unlikely to start dropping off any time soon.

From my own highly subjective little corner of the blogosphere, 2007 was the year that the Bloggers With Book Deals started yielding tangible end results (otherwise known as, coo er gosh, BOOKS!), with many more to follow in 2008. As The Blogsbury Set came of age, and as "portfolio sites" started to make their presences felt, you could also detect the first rumblings of an increasingly widespread shift in priorities. ("Sorry I haven't had much time for blogging recently, but I've been SO BUSY, agents, deadlines, press & PR, oh it's all been such a GIDDY WHIRL!") And what with stunts such as Shaggy Blog Stories, which saw over 200 bloggers left out on the pavement as the Blogsbury glitterati sailed through the velvet ropes, and Post of the Week (over 200 blogs shortlisted to date, so why wasn't YOUR blog GOOD ENOUGH?), there was a distinct sense of competitiveness in the air, as a new élite basked in self-regard ("SO wonderful to see my DEAR FRIENDS doing SO well!") while the Not So Beautiful People muttered seditiously behind their backs ("Who the chuff does HE think HE is, and SHE'S nothing special, and who the f**k made HER the Queen of Bloody Sheba?")

OK, so I'm exaggerating to make a point. But since I have been, let's face it, one of the prime architects of the New Competitiveness, and even if my motives were always about net-widening inclusion rather than judgemental exclusivity, I am not without a certain amount of blood on my hands in this regard. And for that, and for the times where my well-meaning eagerness to champion and celebrate might have run roughshod over others' sensitivities, I can only apologise.

---

(*) Non-sequiturial addendum, while you all prepare your "Oh Mike, don't be so hard on yourself" comments, bless your dear dear hearts but really there's no need, no need at all: With reference to that first wave of link-bloggers, it tickled me something rotten to read these recent words of advice from Jorn Barger, officially the World's First Ever Blogger, on the occasion of our medium's tenth anniversary: "If you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility." Because while part of me wants to say "Respect to you, Old Timer", the other part of me wants to say "Get with the program, Grandad"...

Labels: blogs, community, opinion

This guest post has been contributed by my friend, former colleague and fellow gig-goer Stereoboard, as part of Blogging Against Disablism Day, May 1st 2007.

My son was born just over three years ago, ten weeks early, weighing about 850g. He was in hospital for the first eleven weeks of his life, during which time he had a hearing test that the doctors were concerned about. A subsequent hearing test indicated that he had a "severe hearing problem".

That was how we found out.

I've found that hearing parents of deaf children fall into two camps: those whose babies struggled to live at the start of their lives, and those who didn't. It's easier to cope with a little thing like deafness when you're just thankful that your child is still alive.

I'm not saying it's easy.

There were some things that worried me, that may seem trivial to others. For example, music is a great part of my life. I can measure the passage of time by the music I was listening to. So not being able to share that with him makes me sad, but music is my thing. He'll be different anyway - I can only hope he'll find something else that will fill that part of his life.

Similarly, I was really looking forward to reading to him, and I thought that that was never going to happen. I needn't have worried so much. He loves books as well, and we do look at them together - you just have to make some adjustments. I usually face him, though during the last story of the day I insist on a cuddle.

There are also times when it gets to me.

It occasionally makes me angry. This can be triggered by small things - I remember hearing the sound of waves, and thinking that he'd never enjoy that. Once again, that's my relationship with the world: the effect of the sound of waves on me works because of its association with other events, like happy childhood holidays. The feel of the spray may have an equivalent effect on him when he gets to my age.

There are things that I haven't worked through yet, or that I know will be a problem.

Communication is such a fundamental part of being a human, that there are people who claim being pre-lingually deaf is one of the worst disabilities. We combat that by using non-verbal communication methods (BSL), but we’re still only learning, so he doesn’t get as much input as he should. We also have to convince the rest of our families that they’re going to have to come to terms with BSL being our main method of communication.

The thought of him going to school scares the living daylights out of me, but I don’t think that that’s necessarily anything to do with his deafness.

I would rather he hadn't been born deaf, but I wouldn’t change him now.

My son’s not deaf, he's Ben.

Labels: community, disability, guesting

From now on, my blogroll will be set to display exactly 40 blogs, ordered so that the most recently updated appear at the top of the list (according to blogrolling.com, who provide the service).

Every time I read something particularly good on a blog that's not listed, I'll add them to the list, removing the site that's currently at the bottom. Now that I'm subscribed to blogrolling.com, this will be a quick and simple operation, which won't require messing around with the HTML in my template.

When today's initial list of 40 blogs has been completely replaced, I shall continue by removing the site which has been resident on the list for the longest period of time.

Of course, there's then nothing to stop the deleted blogs being reinstated, the next time that I read something particularly good on them. In fact, I'd expect it to happen a good deal of the time.

In this way, my blogroll will actually work like, goodness me, a roll. It will act as a snapshot of what I'm currently enjoying, which will inevitably be a mixture of old favourites, nifty looking newcomers, occasional pleasures and passing fancies. It will be more interesting to monitor on a regular basis, and more useful in terms of providing a manageable set of up-to-date recommendations for curious readers. And best of all, no-one need feel offended ever again when they drop off the bottom of the list, as this will inevitably happen in turn to every site that's listed.

It has taken me five and half years to come up with a blogrolling policy that I actually feel comfortable with - so phew for that, eh?

Labels: blogs, community, linkage, meta

Apologies for the hastily written and somewhat confusing post below this one, my dear dear friends. I’ve had concerned e-mails and everything! Bless your hearts!

My recent extended blog silence can mostly be attributed to the usual, fairly routine reasons. Firstly, I did feel somewhat out of sorts for most of last week. If I were the sort of person who was given to talking about mis-aligned energies, then I'd say that my energies were decidedly mis-aligned - not to say severely depleted by the rigours of being stuck with an exceptionally repetitive and mind-sapping work task. (Still ongoing, and in danger of wearing out my CTRL, C and V keys.)

I then proceeded to spend the Easter weekend focusing on matters which took me far away from the laptop - and indeed, as far away as possible from the deafening hum of the accursed de-humidifers. (The affected walls in the morning room are still only down to 80% humidity, so there's a way to go yet.) Thus did a brief bout of Blogger's Block morph into a recuperative spell of Blogger's Holiday.

Added to this, a right old tangle of distinctly jaded thoughts have been swirling round inside my head. These have arisen from various sources, but none of them have been of a particularly personal nature. Ordering them into some sort of coherent Statement of Jadedness Think Piece may well turn out to be a futile task - but let's have a bash, and see where it takes us.

---

If you've been out and about in Blogland over the past week or so, then you may well have stumbled across the news of a recent court case, in which a UK blogger was found guilty of conducting an eleven-month campaign of harassment against another UK blogger. (I'm deliberately not linking directly, but the whole gob-smacking story can be accessed through the shortlist for last week's Post of the Week.) The harasser's weapons included a deluge of abusive and threatening e-mails, accompanied by a similar deluge of malicious and defamatory blog posts and blog comments. The allegations levelled by the harasser against her victim (and indeed against many other people over the past few years) are highly detailed and deeply wounding, clearly intended to cause severe damage to both personal and professional reputations. Since they have been repeated over a network of interlinking blogs, calculated to raise their visibility in search engines, these allegations now show up on the first page of Google searches for several of the victims in question. As such, they are clearly visible not just to the victims' friends, relatives and colleagues, but also to any potential employers or clients who might be conducting some elementary research. Meanwhile, having failed to show up for her court case, and despite bail conditions which expressly forbade her from using the Internet, the convicted harasser continues to repeat her charges on her main blog, continuously and obsessively, whilst on the run from the authorities.

Two aspects of the case have been particularly troubling me. Firstly, the harasser has never actually met her victim in person, but instead has built up her impression of the victim's character almost entirely by reading her blog posts and making her own subjective interpretations. The harasser now claims that her own blog forms her legal defence. Not her testimony, but her actual defence. It is as if, by committing her wild and unfounded allegations to a publicly available blog, her words are somehow granted some sort of additional legitimacy. The whole mindset is manifestly delusional, but one of its chief delusions is to substitute online relationships - which can only ever be partial - for fully fleshed relationships in the real world.

Secondly, there would appear to be no mechanism for removing the offending blogs, now that their author has been found guilty of harassment. The allegations live on, and nothing can be done to get rid of them. As the blogs are hosted on the free Blogspot service by Google/Blogger - a US company - Google/Blogger are bound only by US law, and not by British law. This is the standard reply which complainants can expect to receive:The only example that springs to mind of Blogger actually taking action over "objectionable content" concerns an extreme homophobic hate blog called Kill Batty Man, which attempted to incite its readers to murder gay men. Even then, the blog ran for a year before such action was taken, and it took a major outcry from major league A-listers before anything was done. (More details here.)

Meanwhile, a prominent US tech-blogger has recently gone public over a series of abusive and threatening comments which have caused her to fear for her own personal safety, and to cancel her public speaking engagements. In the fall-out from all of this - which has been immense - some people have accused her of hysterical publicity seeking, while others have set about drafting a high-minded "Code of Conduct" for bloggers. (It is this latter initiative which Unreliable Witness skewers so deliciously, thus saving me the effort of constructing a skewering of my own.)

Once again, most of these people have never actually met each other. All the abuse, all the second-guessing, all the amateur psychological profiling - it has all been constructed from reading blog posts, forming assumptions based on subjective interpretations, and gathering so much popular support for those assumptions that they begin to look as if they have real substance behind them.

It's precisely the same mindset that fuels the various bands of conspiracy theorists for whom the "social web" provides such a fertile breeding ground. Cherry-pick your material, garnish it with prejudice, spin it into the juicy narrative of your choice, and defend your position ruthlessly, without need for further question.

---

OK, time to scale things down a good few notches, in order to illustrate a wider point.

A couple of weeks ago, I began to worry about the apparent disappearance of a normally prolific UK blogger: not someone whom I read regularly, but someone whom I "know" from my various excursions within Blogland, and who is quite a well-known figure within her own particular sphere. I needed to speak to her about something - but she wasn't returning e-mails, and her blog had fallen silent. I decided to Google around for clues.

Almost immediately, I discovered that this blogger had signed up for various "social networking" and "community building" sites, of the sort that are generally identified with the whole "Web 2.0" phenomenon. (Here's the Wikipedia entry for Web 2.0.) Many of these sites are based around the concept of registering for the service in question, selecting a name and a small identifying graphic (or "avatar"), filling in a simple descriptive profile (gender/location/interests), and building up a social network of "friends", who have also registered for the service.

This particular blogger certainly wasn't short of "friends", and yet none of them seemed to be remarking upon her disappearance. Well, why would they? After all - and I don't mean to castigate these people in any way, but this goes to the heart of the matter - they're not her friends.

Nevertheless, there was something both poignant and troubling about scrolling through all these public declarations of "friendship", which didn't seem to amount to much more than a hill of beans. For me, it gave the lie to the whole concept of Web 2.0 and "social software". Because friendship - true friendship - is based around a good deal more than assembling a reassuring little cluster of avatars on a web page - as if they were stamps, or realistic indicators of popularity.

True friendship is when your real life neighbours interrupt their Friday night dinner party to spend two hours helping you shift piles of soaking wet plaster from your collapsed ceiling, in their best clothes, with smiles on their faces. It's not saying "Check out this link!", or "Nice avatar!", or "Ooh, I like Coldplay too!"

(She was fine, by the way. An actual friend of hers e-mailed me, and put my mind at rest.)

OK, so you and I are sentient, emotionally intelligent human beings who can easily distinguish the virtual world from the real world. But when you're taking a quick break in the office, are you more likely to hook up with your online "friends", or to turn round and talk to the flesh-and-blood people at the row of desks behind you? Which is the default option? Who knows you best? With whom do you have the most in common? In such instances, would you rather be your real life self, or the idealised avatar-based approximation of yourself? And on those occasions when you do meet up with your fellow bloggers in real life, do you ever find yourself "acting out" your online personality, staying true to that avatar? How do you address each other, if one or the other of you writes under a pseudonym? Does it feel more appropriate to continue using the pseudonym, because switching to real names seems a little too forward? And what of those Myspace types, eagerly amassing hundreds of "friends", some of whom genuinely do seem to be confusing virtual and real life notions of social interaction?

With our shiny Web 2.0 "friendships", we can eradicate the awkwardness, the mess, the sweat, the lumps, the bumps and the peculiar dark corners, in favour of edited and idealised representations of ourselves. If we're not careful, these ersatz relationships can start to feel more appealing than the real thing. And if we're prone to certain ways of thinking, then these illusions can easily convert into delusions.

Reality check: over the course of the past five and a half years, many of the people whom I have met through blogging have graduated into Proper Real Life Version 1.0 Friends. And that's great. Seriously great. But couldn't we come up with more fitting words than "friend", "neighbour" and "community" to describe our Web 2.0 interactions? Or would such a shift fatally undermine the business models that are springing up in the wake of this latest attempt at a paradigm shift?

(Ooh, I think I feel a conspiracy theory coming on! Who's with me?)

Labels: blogs, community, opinion, web

Here at Troubled Diva, we only Do Adverts if they're a) for friends and b) for worthy causes. This is one such rare occasion.

My good friend Sasha is embarking on a humanitarian aid mission to Moldova in May, and she needs to raise £5500 before she leaves. With over £2500 already raised in donations, she has decided to generate additional funds by arranging a one-off Sunday lunchtime screening of Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

As the film isn't currently on general release, this might be an ideal time to catch it, and to sprinkle a little bit of philanthropic love-dust along the way.

The screening takes place at the Tricycle Cinema in Kilburn, London, at 12:30pm on Sunday April 29th. Tickets cost £12.50 (including nibbles), and can be booked by calling 020 7328 1000.

Full information can be found at www.sashinka.com/tricycle.

I'm fully aware that, y'know, linking to things is, like, soooo 2002. (Weblogs that link to things? Whoever heard of such an idea?) But nevertheless, it would be very cool (retro-cool, even) if you could spread the word.

Here, have an image for your sidebar.



Here, have some HTML code to go with that.

<p><a href="http://sashinka.com/tricycle/"><img src="http://www.sashinka.com/tricycle/inctruth29thbox.jpg" width="250" border="0"></a>

Image too big for your sidebar? If so, then take that width="250" down a few sizes.

Thank you. We now return you to your regular scheduled programming.

Labels: charity, community, films, linkage

1. They are full of super-confident high achievers, comparing the advances they got from their book deals.

(If you are fortunate enough to be admitted to one of their conversational bouquets, the customary salutation is “Congratulations on [insert recent major achievement]! Can I just say that I love your work?”)

2. They are full of earnest geeks, assessing the latest plug-in widgets and swapping CSS hacks.

(A suggested conversation-opener: “So, is anyone Twittering the SXSW keynotes?”)

3. If you turn up on your own without knowing anyone, no-one will talk to you. In fact, they’ll think you’re a bit weird.

(Meeting total strangers off the Internet? Who would do such a thing?)

4. If you meet a blogger whom you a) don’t read or b) have never heard of before, admitting as much will spell certain social death.

(The recommended face-saver at such moments is “Oh! I am aware of your work!”)

5. The prime purpose of a blogmeet is to network, network, network. If you come away without being added to half a dozen new blogrolls, and without the phone numbers of a couple of good agents stuffed in your pocket, the event will have been a failure.

All of which is by way of a reminder that there’s a Nottingham blogmeet this Saturday, from 14:00 until mid-evening, in the café/ bar of the Broadway cinema on Broad Street. (If you're not local, here's a map.) All are welcome.

Labels: blogmeets, blogs, community, nottingham

(This is a cross-post with Rullsenberg Rules.)

It's time, don't you think? Since Nottingham is so centrally located - 1:40 by train from London, 1:16 from Birmingham, 2:25 from Manchester - and since we've never yet hosted a public blogmeet, and since Lisa Rullsenberg and I have been infected with a sudden dose of The Keens...

...and since, as we all know, the Best Fun is Organised Fun...

...well then, here goes.

The date: Saturday March 10th 2007.

The time: From around 2pm until mid-evening. Come when you like, leave when you like, stay for as long or as little as you like.

The venue: The ground floor café/bar of Broadway Cinema on Broad Street, in central Nottingham. 10 minutes by foot from the train station, or a short tram or taxi ride.

Here's a map (PDF format).

Licensed bar, hot and cold food available throughout the day, open plan, large tables, pleasant buzz, appropriate arts/media milieu. Because we do like a good milieu. No smoking, but it's only a quick hop outside for a crafty chuff.

The vibe: Friendly, welcoming and resolutely non-cliquey. Hell, Lisa and I have never even met; how could we be cliquey?

The door policy: All are welcome - from the Nottingham area, or from any other part of the UK. Or, indeed, The World.

Hope you can make it. See you there. I'll be the one in the nice smart shirt, trying to (*cough*) maintain level eye contact.

Labels: blogmeets, blogs, community, nottingham

The steady trickle of hits that I have been receiving from a password-protected "panelist" page on the 2007 Bloggies site can only mean two things. Firstly, that the judges are working through the "long-lists" (typically between 20 and 30 sites in each category, if memory serves correctly), and voting on which sites should make it through to the shortlists. Secondly, that Troubled Diva has made it onto one of the long-lists, most probably in the World's Best Poof category.

At the risk of sounding complacent and blasé, this doesn't come as a huge surprise, but for one very simple reason: unlike the majority of "gay" weblogs, the readers of Troubled Diva are mostly straight. Thus, when it comes to making nominations in the World's Best Poof category, they are more likely to think of TD. It's a cute enough little loophole, but not one to which any great measure of ego-stroking self-importance should be attached.

In any case, as anyone inside our cosy little loop would tell you, this year's Bloggies have been overshadowed by two vastly more important blogging award shebangs: the First Annual Insignificant Awards (who announced their winner yesterday), and the Second Annual Swampy Awards, which came out on Monday.

Now, since last year's "Swampy" (for Best British Blog; pictured left) constitutes the only accolade I have won since picking up the school Scripture prize in 1974 (always the chuffing bridesmaid, story of me life), you can imagine my horror at discovering that this year, I have been deposed by some upstart newcomer called Little Red Boat.

Well now. If that Anna Pickard thinks I'm going to graciously hand over my tiara without an unseemly scuffle, she's got another think coming. Frankly, she's going to have to prise it out of my jealous little fingers with a sharp instrument.

I'M STILL BIG!

IT'S JUST BLOGGING THAT GOT BIGGER!

I AM READY FOR MY HYPERLINK, MISTER KOTTKE!

Sorry. Just trying to maintain some Brand Consistency here.

(But sincere thanks to everyone who nominated. I'm no Ungrateful Diva.)

Labels: blogawards, blogs, community, ego, linkage, meta

Remember “Post of the Week” – a feature that ran on this site in late 2005 and early 2006?

Remember all those grand plans we had about launching it under its own domain?

Remember how all those grand plans came to nought, as Real Life got in the way and the momentum fizzled out?

Shame, wasn’t it?

Well, all is not lost. Following a renewed burst of activity behind the scenes, we’re ready to test the site out with a couple of low-key trial runs.

But first, we need to assemble an editorial team.

Rather than pester the dozen or so people who volunteered last year – as circumstances and levels of enthusiasm might have changed since then – I’d like to issue a fresh shout-out.

If you’d like to be a member of the Post of the Week editorial team, then please e-mail me (mikejla @ btinternet dot com), or leave a message in the comments box.

Ideally we’re looking for a team of around 10 to 12 people, whose responsibilities will be as follows.

1. Shortlist selection. Once every 10 to 12 weeks, you (and you alone) will need to sift through all of that week’s nominated posts, and assemble a shortlist of no more than 12 posts. Nominations close on Friday nights (UK time), and you will need to have the shortlist ready by Saturday lunchtime.

(That sounds like a tight deadline, but you will probably have been keeping an eye on the nominations all the way through the week, as they come through on the site.)

2. Judging. Once every 5 or 6 weeks, as part of a team of three (two members plus one guest, drawn from the readership), you will read through the shortlist and vote for your five favourites, in order. You will have from Saturday lunchtime until Sunday evening to do this. Your individual votes will not be made public.

So there’s not a huge amount of work, but you will need to be available at weekends.

There’s one further catch: to avoid charges of nepotism, members of the editorial team will be exempt from having any of their posts nominated, whether they are “on duty” that week or not.

For further reference, here’s the “About” page on the site proper.

As soon as we get a team assembled, we’ll start with the trial runs – the sooner the better. Ooh, I’m getting quite excited about this already...

Labels: community, postoftheweek

"My place, posh frock, or else the Mother gets it."

And so, just three days after Girl With A One Track Mind first published it on her blog, and following a steady ground-swell of linkage from duly appalled fellow bloggers, an odious piece of e-blackmail from the Sunday Times finds itself at Number One on Google for a search on its author's name. Coming hot on the heels of last month's similarly successful blog-link campaign against a spam-commenting online florist, this is further proof of the power of the collective link.

Of course, some might maintain that Abby "One Track" Lee was "naive" for thinking that she could hang on to her anonymity, and that Hellen was only hastening the inevitable, and that the rest of us are being "naive" for throwing up our hands in maiden-auntish horror. Happens all the time, journalism's a rough old game, only doing his job, yadda yadda.

To which I say: isn't that the moral equivalent of justifying the theft of an unattended handbag on the grounds that someone was probably going to steal it anyway, and so you might as well get in there first?

Actually, no. It's worse than that. Handbags and their contents can be replaced; personal privacy can't be.

If Abby Lee and her supporters are to be branded as "naive", then that's only because, like most reasonable people, they operate from the assumption that most of us are still minded to treat each other with fairness, decency and respect. In which case, I'm glad that, in these hard-nosed, cynical times, Nicholas Hellen's e-mail still has the power to shock.

In any case, the balance of shaky assumptions lies firmly on Hellen's side. Assumptions that Abby Lee would comply with his demands through fear, or that her vanity and/or desire for "success" at any price (to use a somewhat dubious definition of the concept of "success") would send her rushing into the arms of her captors, posh frock in hand, ready for her Glamorous Makeover. Not to mention the assumption that the unmasking of the author of a newly published and still relatively unknown book constituted a legitimate, public-interest news story, fit for Page 3 of a "quality" Sunday broadsheet.

But perhaps Hellen's most "naive" assumption of all was in thinking that he could f**k with an extended community of nice, friendly, supportive people with Google Page Ranks of 5 and 6, and an aggregated readership of thousands, and get away with it. Hopefully, this little campaign will send out a signal to Old Media's most reptilian foot-soldiers, in possibly the only language they respect or understand, that we are NOT to be f**ked with in the future.

Labels: blogs, community, genderpolitics, linkage, onetrack, opinion

Marcello has started counting down his Top 50 albums of 2006; meanwhile, my mate Dymbel is episodically blogging the contents of his annual Best Of The Year mix CD, in a rolling post which expands more or less daily.

Diamond Geezer spotted an Olympic cock-up; the newspapers were alerted; the council apologised. Ever the provocateur, DG is now arguing in favour of closing 20% of Britain's post offices.

Why are bin bags so flimsy? Gordon posts the definitive answer.

JonnyB has been nominated for "Best UK Blog" by a bunch of yee-hah, woo-for-war neo-cons. As a result, a concerted collective attempt is being made to get him to win, thus striking a blow for... well, I'm not quite sure what, but a blow most certainly would be struck. Oh yes. At the time of writing, he is in second position and rapidly closing the gap on the current leader. In a thrilling twist on the principles of democracy (but hey, it wouldn't be the first time for this lot), you are permitted to cast a new vote every day. Hint. Hint.

And on a similar theme:(I wanted to nominate that funny American lady who lost her job and has a daughter, but I couldn't remember the URL.)

Labels: blogs, community, linkage