Derrick Peterman has posted the roundup for The Session #42.
Once again, the beer blogosphere provided many unique, memorable personal perspectives, this time, about how beer connects us to places. In many cases, the “special” beers associated with special places where rather ordinary, even substandard, as most posters readily acknowledged. And as I anticipated, “place” clearly meant different things to different people.
This seemed like an excellent topic to me, but only a dozen bloggers chimed in with contributions. Perhaps we should blame the summer doldrums. However it’s also fair to consider if the beer blogosphere has “moved on.”
Beer blogging certainly is alive and well. Look at the number of attendees for the first Beer Bloggers Conference (first in the U.S., that is, since the initial international gathering will occur earlier in Prague).
Anyway, it wouldn’t be shocking if The Session has run its course. After all, it looks as if the separate site created for Wine Blogging Wednesday has not been updated more than a year ago, although it would seem the project continued until at least the most recent May.
Just an observation . . .
I would say a some slack may be due to the busy summer. I felt bad as I posted mine a day late (I got caught up with other activities and !forgot!). I hope we have a big push next month as I love reading all the posts
Beer blogging isn’t dead. It’s waiting for it’s “My Dinner With Andre” moment. It’s stuck in a “Julia Child” rut at the moment and may well veer into a “Wicker Man” phase for all I know en route to who knows where.
It feels weird as a blog reader to talk somewhat negatively about work that I don’t pay for… but hopefully gently and constructively, I found that once the Session moved from drinking and writing on a certain style of beer each month to more nebulous concepts, it became much less interesting. Some folks produced beautiful stuff, but that stuff was often stuff they had already written about on their blogs. It seemed folks were struggling to come up with the themes, and then struggling to write about those themes. I wonder if going back to “this month, drink a [type of beer] and write about it and stuff it makes you think about” might make things easier.
Regardless, thanks to all the bloggers who do the sessions.
As a beer blogger who loves the Sessions, I have to say that the last few weeks were a terrible time for a lot of people when it comes to blogging. Blogging, it seems to me, runs on routine, especially during a time when you’re reliably in front of computers. With vacations, PTO, the summer beer festival season, and everything else, I think August was just a tough month. I know I didn’t have the time to post a Session topic, and I really wanted to.
All that said, I did think the topic was a little too broad. A lot of the submissions were about memories of beers like Rolling Rock and Yuengling, which were cool, but it would have been cooler had the topic had the specificity of, say “story involving a good memory of a non-craft beer” or even something like “favorite place to drink craft beer that’s not there anymore.” When the topic is vague, it’s hard to feel as is we’re all writing on the same thing, which is the point, right? Perhaps, as Bill suggests, keeping the topics focused on beer styles is a way to do it, but I actually like the idea of mixing topics up.
I’d say it’s a little early to declare the Sessions past their useful life. If we have a few more months of low turnout, then maybe it’s time to think about it, but for now I think we can blame it on August and a tough topic.
I tweeted a shorter response, but as a new comer to the online forums and community surrounding Craft Beer blogging and reviewing, I can tell you that it is a pretty fragmented space. Assume that you’re following 400 breweries and bloggers on Twitter. If 300 of those people have blogs, that’s a big potential for information. And then those bloggers comment on other blogs and forums like this and link back to their own place, it’s tough to follow.
In short, I don’t believe beer blogging is dead, but I think it is very spread out and struggling for life as a community. Especially given the probrewer.com poll a couple weeks ago regarding beer rating sites.
So help me out blogosphere, is there a centralized place out there for Beer Bloggers other than a follow list on Twitter? If there is, that’s awesome, if there is not, I may have a proposal.
It died a few months ago, Jake. It was called RSBS – Real sumple beer syndication. No one has stepped up to replace it as a beer blogging aggregator.
Jake, two things spring to mind as comprehensive clearinghouses, other than the vast listings like what we see on the right of Stan’s blog.
1) The Beer Blog search engine by Hop Talk: http://hop-talk.com/resources/beer-blog-search/
2) Ashley Routson (the Beer Wench) has her series profiling beer bloggers.
That said, neither is really what you mean, I think, in that neither distributes content.
I read an insane number of beer blogs via Google Reader and Twitter, and I’m still finding new ones every day. For sheer time’s sake, I don’t even follow strictly beer review sites. Plus, there’s podcasts, sites that aren’t really blogs, and every newspaper and magazine that might cover beer. This takes an enormous amount of time, and the efforts to centralize it (like the Hop Press) have all been pretty (perhaps necessarily) controlled and can border on cliquey, with the same names popping up everywhere.
I, for one, would be more than open to any proposal for how to collect and distribute content in a more organized way. I agree that it could re-infuse some life (or at least ease of use) into the community.
Guys,
Thanks for the quick response. I want to phrase this very carefully because I want to avoid seeming like one of the people that spam blogs with their own sites, but this is a subject near to why a friend and I started our site two weeks ago.
It’s called ibrewtoo.com and the goal is to provide a platform for better conversations about the craft brewing industry. It is in it’s infancy, but I would appreciate if you would check it out and let us know what you think. You set up a profile, incorporate your twitter feed, blogs are aggregated into an activity feed, there are groups, pages, and a marketplace. The goal is to make it easier for home brewers and craft beer enthusiasts to talk with each other and the professionals in the industry.
We’re not trying to be professionals or replicate what is out there on larger sites, but we want to give a hub for other people to not be so intimidated about trying a craft beer and sharing their thoughts.
Jake — Jack Curtin was praising this as an aggregator: http://beer.alltop.com/
It’s pretty comprehensive, and if you scroll over each link, often a good chunk of the content behind the link appears.
I read that Jack Curtin post, and while I like what alltop does, it doesn’t provide all that much benefit for me over Google Reader. I did log on to ibrewtoo, and I’ll play with that for a while. Seems to have a lot in common with the “Beer Social networks” listed at right.
For me, any good aggregation would be something that:
1) One could sort by topic to find (or avoid) reviews, homebrewing sites, brewery blogs, etc
2) Could group and relate posts on similar topics by different bloggers (a la Google news)
3) Would be interactive in the sense of comments, etc. To do that, it would need to be a community like Facebook, I suppose.
Still, even if such a thing existed, I don’t know what effect it would really have on beer blogging, other than making our lives a little easier. The reality is that part of the price we pay for free, uncensored content is the time it takes to sift through. Those of us doing it just have to have some faith that readers will find us over time if we’re doing it well, and those readers will just have to trust the writers they already like to refer other good writers.
If you’re looking for ways to improve the participation, perhaps a simple one is simply posting a Session reminder about a week before the first Friday of the month. People are busy and since August was one of those months where there were 5 weeks before first Fridays of the month rather than the usual 4, people tend to forget.
As my topic choice, appreciate people’s opinion positive of negative. I figured writing about a beer from a special place in your life was a pretty straightforward topic that plenty of people could relate to, and would be easy for people to write about.
I think that the older posters tended to write about older, mass marketed beers in the 70’s, while the younger posters tended to write about more modern influencial craft beers says something about beer in our culture.
I’m not a particularly dedicated blogger, but I can say that the topics for the Session tend to be hit-or-miss as far as making me think “I want to participate this month”. I prefer tightly-focused topics that are about beer, not about the blogger.
The only one so far this year that really tweaked my buttons was Collaboration Beers, and this month’s was about the nadir of possible topics (the only worse ones are navel-gazing like What is the Story Behind the Name of Your Beer Blog?). I don’t have any beers or breweries that connect me to special places; just like the one a while back that said “enjoying beer is as much about people as it is malt and hops”, even if I wanted to participate I can’t other than by saying that the theme is bullshit, which isn’t really in the spirit of the occasion.