Innovation in Software

Last night Sarah Hartley announced the closure of the Mancunian Way blog that I’ve been contributing to for a couple of years now.

Sarah explains on her own blog that she is on to new adventures.

I have slightly mixed emotions about this myself. I won’t miss the mild panic when Sarah’s email goes around asking for a blog of the week and I have to think smartly as I realise I haven’t contributed in a while, but that’s about the only thing I’ll miss.

The highlight for me will almost certainly be the the write-up I did for the Tony Wilson Experience last Summer, which the council liked so much they shoved it in their own press section and asked for permission afterwards. Always nice to have your writing enjoyed by an audience, and the feedback I got from the MEN blogs in particular was fantastic.

I also managed to cover b.tween, the anniversary of the Baby, several Northern Startup events, and managed to riff about things I thought of as interesting and useful.

So, I will miss it, quite a bit. A significant part of my online identity was “blogs for the MEN”, however it gives a little more space and time for other things in my writing life, and I’m off to do some new writing adventures of my own – all will be announced soon.

I will also watch with interest what the MEN decide to do in future post-Sarah. I don’t know of another regional newspaper in the UK that has as well developed a blog section (and for that Sarah should definitely be commended), so it would be a huge shame for it to lose momentum now. I have no idea what comes next over there, my only contact at MEN was Sarah.

Good luck to Sarah, those of you finding me via that blog please stay tuned for my next projects, and let me just say: The blog is dead. Long live the blog.

Organising BarCamp Manchester has allowed me to get to know some of the people over at the Manchester Evening News a little better, thanks to them hosting us on March 1st. In the course of events I suggested maybe a few blog articles about the local technology and geek scene would be a good idea on their blogs area.

Naturally, this resulted in me committing to producing said articles myself.

And so I have started contributing to “Manchester is Online”, which used to be called “The Mancunian Way” the blog that changed name and then back again to “The Mancunian Way”, (I didn’t get the memo :-) ) – one of the most widely read blogs in the region.

I should stress at this point that there are strict editorial guidelines on what I can publish there, so please hold back your press releases. No “advertising copy” is permitted whatsoever.

I’m just going to geek out there in a way that helps “normal people” relate to what it is the rest of us do. It’s a much more general audience over there, so it’s going to be interesting to try and work out how to relate to them.