As part of this year’s Brighton Digital Festival, I’m organising a Brighton Bloggers meetup. It’s on from 6-8pm on October 21st, near the station, so it should be easy for people to come straight from work. Full details and (free!) tickets are available via eventbrite.
Even in the age of social media, there are still hundreds of blogs based in Brighton. At the Brighton Homebrew Website Club recently, I realised the Brighton Bloggers directory is still online and it made me nostalgic for the meetups. As well as being a place to talk about blogging, these events were great for community building; finding out about other blogs in town, or meeting the writers of ones you already read.
In planning this, I ended up looking into some of the previous Brighton Blogger meetups. Among the broken links and dead sites there are still a large number of working pages from years ago. (I’ve been listening to Disintegration Loops recently, and the linkrot feels similar to the effect of that soundtrack).
The first Brighton Bloggers event I could find was in August 2003, which was even mentioned on NTK, a much-missed weekly email newsletter. It was around this time that the Brighton Bloggers directory was first created. It seems to have been initially compiled by Joh Hunt, with Jane Dallaway taking over and maintaining it to this day.
I found a few things I’d forgotten about too, such as mentions of the Brighton and Hove Virtual Festival, the first of which was held in 2001. I read some accounts of the 2003 award ceremony which I attended with Joh. Of the 5 nominees for best personal site, two are still running (here’s wordridden’s account of the night), and two of the other nominated domains work, but no longer contain blogs.
There have been other meetups over the years from other groups of Bloggers, such as one in January 2009, which rowstar wrote about:
A small but interesting gathering took over a corner of the recently opened Florist pub (which was the PV), talking about everything from retro phones to tractor-mounted lasers (blame Ant for that one), eco-travelling to the recent celebrity Twitter explosion. All in all it was a very pleasant evening, and nice to connect with fellow bloggers after years of writing away in my own little vacuum. As was generally agreed last night, all this advanced virtual communication technology is all very well, but it’s good to bring it back to the real world once in a while and meet people face to face.
And there was another group who met in 2013, as well as a Bloggers’ stitch and bitch later that year. I also found a fun blog round-up from the Argus in 2009, written by Jo Wadsworth.
I think there is still a place for blogs, and I get most of my news via hundreds of feeds in the feedly app. I think it’s important to produce content outside of the walls gardens of facebook, medium, twitter etc, and there does seem to be a growing return to blogs (sometimes referred to these days as ‘the Isles of Blogging’). The thing I miss most about blogging was the comments and the community. Hopefully this event will be a small step towards bringing those back.
Aw, nostalgia – I remember going along to that first meet, and am still proudly sporting the badge on my blog… And yet, also blogging is definitely more than just a retro thing. It felt like it was a refreshing format change at the time – the idea of a diary instead of a webpage, but with more attention than we have with insta-posts these days. Blogging has shaped my writing so much since then, even if the blog is only a handful of readers.
I’ve been thinking about a network for alternative networking platforms, to encourage people to try out other media. Is blogging and RSS “alternative” these days?
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