Blog networks not so shiny

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Gary

Earlier this week online blog network Shiny Media went into administration, which led to Techcrunch to declare the UK’s experiment with blog networks were over.

That’s probably going a bit far, but for all the growth and proliferation of blogging, it’s probably never been harder to set up and keep a blog network afloat in this day and age.

A few years back, when The World had generally decided that citizen journalism was definitely going to kill the mainstream media and blogs were the future, somewhere, somehow the misconception arose that blogging was the place to make money.

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Socrates

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Gary

During the course of the day job, the football blogging, and the twofootedtackle podcast, I’ve got to know and meet assorted other football bloggers, mostly down the pub.

A few of us (namely The Onion Bag, Some People Are On The Pitch, twofootedtackle, and Fantasy Football Agent – I’ve not done nearly as much as them on this) thought it’d be a good thing to actually get a proper chat and networking event for football bloggers set up, and Socrates is the result of that.

Socrates is a football bloggers event, kindly sponsored by Football3s, on 9th September in Vauxhall. There’ll be food, drink and, of course, football.

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The FA: Whatever your level

Posted on July 23, 2009 by Gary

Deep down, part of me still believes I could have made it as a footballer. Well, if it hadn’t been for discovering beer and generally being lazy. And possibly learning how to tackle and head a ball. Minor inconveniences aside, I could have been a contender.

Anyway, as part of my non-footballing development I stopped playing around the age of 17 when I went to college. Between then and finishing university, I really didn’t play that often, other than the occasional kickabout or turning out as an unfit favour for a mate’s team.

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Please bear with me, your blog is important to us

Posted on July 19, 2009 by Gary

Want to know the meaning of sheer blog terror? The knowledge that clicking just one button could make a huge difference to your blog. Or it could destroy it. You wouldn’t know until you clicked that button.

It was this form of terror I experienced at approximately 8.34pm this evening, while attempting to set up a domain redirect from my old wordpress blog to this place. I’d followed the instructions, but still wasn’t entirely sure I’d done everything correctly.

My blog was going to be, essentially, a version of Schrodinger’s cat.

*click*

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Removal van unloaded, now to rearrange the furniture

Posted on July 16, 2009 by Gary

Congratulations if you found this place. It’s kind of a bit new, but in need of some DIY.

Yes, after years of blogging on wherever, I finally caved in and got my own domain name. And, er, this is it. It looks exactly like the last one doesn’t it.

Essentially, the plan is for this all to change. I’ve got plans to redesign the theme and split my feeds into at least two different topics, namely football and other stuff. And to make it look pretty.

The downside to this is I’ve never attempted to design a blog before.

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The old ones are the best

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Gary Andrews

Anybody not from Britain looking at the Twitter trending topics today would have probably been baffled to see Mrs Slocombe’s Pussy near the top. Thanks to the British sense of humour, the catchphrase from 70s sitcom Are You Being Served was all over the microblogging site in tribute to the death of comic actress Mollie Sugden [1]. Jonathan Ross was one of those responsible for getting the topic to the top of Twitter charts.

Sure enough, other countries were a bit puzzled by the trend, so much so that both Techcrunch and Mashable wrote stories complaining that Twitter was getting infected with spam again [2]. They were soon put right in the comments.

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