Saturday 21 May 2011

Competing Priorities


In a minute or two I'm off to see Glyn of Rake fame for a pint. He is in Manchester to watch AFC Wimbledon and I am in Manchester to attend a National Winter Ales Organising Meeting. The first meeting to start organising next year in fact, so as Deputy Organiser, I couldn't really miss it.

That's why I'm not at the Beer Bloggers Conference, but I'm not letting anyone but myself down by not being there. If I didn't attend my NWAF meeting I would be.

Simples.

As is our choice of venue. The Marble Arch

9 comments:

Ed said...

I'm not at the beer bloggers conference because I didn't fancy it. I will be out on the piss tonight though so I'm not letting the side down.

Unknown said...

When blogging becomes a priority, it becomes a problem. I'm away today doing stuff that I don't blog, tweet or facebook about. Hard for some bloggers to understand, but there's more to life than regurgitating your beery life across social media.

Rob Sterowski said...

Show-off Simon. "Ooooh, look at me, I've got real friends."

Neville Grundy said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Neville Grundy said...

When I first read the phrase, "Beer Bloggers Conference", I genuinely thought it was a wind-up. There are levels of appreciating beer:

1. Drinking it.
2. Writing about drinking it.
And now, apparently:
3. Travelling to a conference to discuss writing about drinking beer.

What next? A support group for those addicted to beer blogging? A crisis phone line?

SteveF said...

I follow quite a few of the participants of the conference on Twitter. At some stage one of them (can't remember who) pointed out that conference related tweets had reached an audience of many thousands. This is all well and good and I don't have a problem with the conference - blogging can be an important aspect of the beer world and it seems reasonable to get together on occasion to chat about this. However, as far as I can tell, the vast majority of the tweets were along the lines of pointing out how nice everyone was, what a good time they were having and how tasty some beer had been. There wasn't, relatively speaking, a huge amount of content being twittered.

It seems to me that if you're going to reach out to lots of people then the tweets should have been more focused towards the actual content of the conference (assuming there was a good amount of it) rather than being devoted towards the social aspect of things. It's nice that everyone had a good time, but eventually it gets a bit boring to read about.

Tandleman said...

Steve - I think you may have pointed out the elephant in the room. I think that there was only 50 tweets in total and not many of them anything other than social in the normal sense of the word rather than social media reach.

Still I don't know if the conference had aims and objectives and if they were met, but I suspect a lot of people's aim was to drink a lot of beer and have a good time.

And why not?

Tandleman said...

Correction. There was more than 50 tweets. I think here is just a sample

http://ht.ly/50nnF

Erlangernick said...

"There wasn't, relatively speaking, a huge amount of content being twittered."

So nicely said I thought it deserved to be quoted without comment. (Well, except this comment!)