Blogging all over the canals

Exactly three years ago the Daily Telegraph ran a story, 'How blogging is taking over the world'.

In short, no it wasn't.  The article reads almost like a period piece now, blind to the future of Twitter, Facebook, smartphones and other such developments.

When I started, over six years ago, I thought it would take off a lot more quickly than it did.   Sue of No Problem started about the same time, but there were only three or four of us for the first year. 

I still remember my post 'Nutwood makes it 5 canal blogs' - exactly five years ago, over a year after I started.

Canal blogs started as personal diaries, and most are still like that.  It takes a special gift to make a cruising log a compelling read, but that's cool.  They aren't supposed to be fine works of literature, just letters to family and friends. 

Some of these 'letters home' blogs still develop big followings, but I was never very good at the cruising log, which is why I started writing Granny Buttons as a sort of column.

For a long time I would read them all. But now, with well over 100 active boat blogs, I've had to be more selective, and I tend mainly to read those which write more specific posts about single subjects, with just an occasional photo, not a whole photostream.  

And it doesn't have to be all about canals; it's enough to know they are boaters and can make waterways references without having to explain themselves. 

Someone who's developing this 'specific post' style very well is Halfie.   I was charmed by his wonderful post Painting a picture, with the arresting photo of his mother with her 80th birthday cake (luckily not 80 candles) and the patchwork of paintings from her family members - what a marvellous memento for her!  And it has a waterways theme as good as any. 

Halfie's posts are exactly what I had in mind all those years ago when I wrote on the uk.rec.waterways newsgroup 'I blog therefore I am' and concluded 'Get blogging!'. 

He's even developed his own little USP - a weekly Top Thirty chart history of waterways websites, based on UK Waterways Site Ranking.   

Another great blogger is Steve Parkin, who writes some excellent pocket-reviews of second-hand canal books on his blog Albert.   His post Rude Place Names and Victorian Class Warfare on the Thames, a review of Time on the Thames by Eric de Mare, induced me to seek out and buy a copy of the book myself online.

He also did some lovely reports on his holiday in Cornwall a few weeks ago.  

[Steve, can I put in a plea for you to drop the 'signature' at the end of every blog post?  Trouble is, it pops up as a snippet in every Google alert for the word 'narrowboat' :-)]

Sarah of nb Warrior ('One woman's obsession with big fore ends') is another who's on my must-read list.  The week before last she did a lovely piece about a new paraffin cooking stove (new in the sense of 1956 army surplus, but unused) - Now we're cooking with... paraffin, and followed it immediately with Market halls, an elegy for the vanishing breed of market halls of northern England.  Her posts are always informative as well as entertaining.

There are quite a few others on my own regular reading list, of course, but I'll not diminish them by simply naming them.  Each one deserves at least a paragraph giving an example post, and I'll try to do that later.

In my 'boatroll' I try to list all the canal blogs I know about, but many are moribund or perhaps sleeping, and others don't really seek to entertain strangers like me.  As I said, they are simply letters home, and that's fine.

If you aren't on my own reading list - and I'd not like to say what that is, since it changes regularly - you'll still pop up in my sights if you mention the words 'narrowboat', 'canals' or 'british waterways' in your blog posts.  I've got Google alerts running for all those.  (Tip: don't mention 'panama')

Blogging might not be taking over the world as the Telegraph prematurely predicted in 2006, but it's still an awfully large party of my daily reading - and more so than the Telegraph itself, to be honest.

Comments

[Andrew Denny]

Helen, it's not so much a 'riposte' as an agreement! Blogging's still alive as ever.

It's just that Twitter and Facebook have made it far easier for those who can't fit their pint-pot of opinion into a quart :-)

[Helen Gazeley]

Just thought you'd be interested in a "riposte" from the Guardian earlier this year.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/24/charles-arthur-blogging-twitter

[Steve Parkin]

Many thanks for you kind comments. As Sarah from Warrior says, this is the "endorsement to end all endorsements". I too will have to change my masthead.

Keep up the good work showing the rest of us how it should be done! What would canal blogging do without Granny?

[Sarah]

Thank you for your kind endorsement. I have reproduced it on my dustjacket.

[Halfie]

Nice Status Quo reference in your title! Thanks for your kind comments. Your own blog is, of course, the canal blogger's blog. Blogging "properly", with links and all, takes a lot of time. I'm trying (very trying).