Friday 29 May 2009
I started writing my first blog, Carnival Saloon, in September 2007. At the time I was spending a lot of time at work explaining blogging best practice to various radio producers and presenters but not actually blogging myself. Carnival Saloon was born to see if I could practice what I preached and give me an outlet to do some writing.
The first post was about Battlestar Galactica, the second a review of a Rachel Unthank gig and the 17th some thoughts about beer. Pretty random stuff, but all things I was sufficiently interested in to want to write about. My friends seemed to enjoy this hodge-podge but it eventually became apparent that more people I didn't know were mainly looking at my music and MP3 posts. These were fun because the blog became more conversational and I challenged myself to post MP3s that might not be too common.
One of the bits of advice that I used to give would-be bloggers is stick to one thing and do it well. Taking my own medicine I decided to only write about music at Carnival Saloon and turn it into a fully-fledged MP3 blog. That's worked very well in many respects. More people look at that blog each month but fewer of those are my friends who either don't care for banjos or would prefer to know what I think of the new Star Trek film than hear a Phil Ochs track.
So here we are. A second blog for all the stuff I no longer write about at Carnival Saloon. You can expect occasional musings on such fascinating subjects as what I've watched on TV, cooked for dinner, read before going to bed, learnt at the pub quiz and cursed the modern world for. With any luck this will be a spin-off more like Frasier than Joey. But I'm making no promises.
