The return of the anonymous blogger
In the refurbished splendour of Band on the Wall, the 2009 Manchester Blog Awards returned last night, a regular fixture on Manchester’s digital calendar. A packed Band on the Wall saw a new host for the evening, Social Media Café’s Maria Ruban, who introduced a range of short readings by some of the evening’s shortlisted bloggers.
The Blog Awards, which MDDA has supported since its inception, remains a uniquely Mancunian event, with the city’s creative community never slow in putting their opinions down on a diverse range of blogs, that ranged from the personal to the provocative. As Kate Feld, the organiser and instigator of the event, made clear in her introduction, the quality of the submissions this year had been so great that each category shortlist had been extended from four to five blogs.
Dave Carter, head of MDDA, is one of the judges, and in the office, we always enjoy having a look through the shortlisted entries here in the office. With prizes for best new blog, best neighbourhood blog, best personal blog, best arts and culture blog and best writing on a blog there’s a diverse range of entries. Both the winners and the shortlisted writers always seem to be genuinely pleased at the recognition – after all, unlike many other genres, blog writing is a truly democratic one, open to all.
Blog of the year was an unusual one however, as the writer of Lost In Manchester preferred to remain anonymous. A celebration of the “weird, wonderful and just plain ordinary” that most of us don’t notice when walking around our city, it’s a great place to start exploring the shortlist. In the early days of blogging, the anonymous blog was quite common, as writers chose a pseudonym rather than let everyone know their name. It was nice to see that some of the best blogging still prefers to keep anonymous.
This year also saw the return of a previous blog award winner, Jenn Ashworth, whose first novel, a domestic psychodrama set in a drab suburb in Fleetwood, “A Kind of Intimacy” has been one of the year’s best novels. We were treated to an extract of her second novel, “Cold Light,” a genuine exclusive, as it’s the first time she’s read it in public. Collective shivers ran down the spine as a very ordinary civic scene, this time set in Morecambe, turned grisly.
Amongst the various digital communities of Manchester, the writers, commentators, and photographers who write regular blogs in the city remain a key part of the creative economy – and so it was great to see Creative Tourist, the recently launched website for all that’s cultural in Manchester, sponsor the best arts and culture blog award, won by arts blogger, Ella Wredenfors, for her “Run Paint Run Run” blog. Her prize is a commission to write a piece for the Creative Tourist website.
As the number of new blogs entered for the awards this year shows, there remains a large part of the “blogosphere” that speaks with a Mancunian accent.
