27 May 06

Blogging vs. the London creative industry

I was reading Mike Stenhouse’s blog post on the London web community, which is basically about him meeting other London bloggers on a night out. Being bloggers, it wasn’t a normal night out – pub, club, kebab – it was more like javascript, dom, kebab. Now, Mike seems like a ordinary, non-geeky type of guy – I sat near him at a workshop once, but he probably doesn’t know that – but the type of bloggers he knows and lists don’t work in the industry. My industry. The one which doesn’t care how things work, just as long as it looks nice. The creative web industry.

Looking around the blogosphere (oh how I hate that word), there seems to be a complete lack of people in the creative web industry that blog. I couldn’t think of anyone that I read regularly, or even semi-regularly, that works in the same industry.

At Mook, where I currently work, only two of us blog, that I know of. One of them is me – the very beginner blogger – and the other is Mike who only recently join us, and also only recently joined the creative industry. This is out of roughly 15 people, which although a low percentage, the number of bloggers across London should add up. Doesn’t it? Are people in the industry put off by the idea of blogging, or do co-exist with other blogs without getting noticed?

The people in our industry could be said to be doing a more culturally important job compared to people not in it. The work gets viewed by a lot more people, and can be inspiring to others. Do the people who make these websites feel justified by only making these sites, rather than writing about them too?

We could say that due to these sites being highly viewed, the chance of experimentation is diminished with it. Clients spend literally a fuckload of money on these sites. It borders the obscene sometimes. They don’t want someone (like me) spending time experimenting with the latest, trendiest techniques. They need some thing tried and tested. I’m sure that this barrier is more lax outside the creative industry meaning that web developers can spend time working on new, interesting things and being able to document it. Meaning that more traffic will go to their blogs rather than the safe that’s-so-2003 blogs. Like mine. No, mine’s actually so 2002. It’s almost retro. So do people in the industry have blogs, but not receive attention to them for their relatively ‘safe’ technical work?

Am I wrong though? Have I just not been paying attention? Surely I must have read someone-in-the-industry’s blog at some point? Or is everyone too busy hanging round Hoxton Square with their bad hair, thick glasses, and white skinny jeans? Hmmm…

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