Visit the Boak and Bailey's Beer Blog site

Boak & Bailey's Beer Blog - Writing about beer and pubs since 2007

Bad news: this is a blog post*about blog posting. There’ll be a post that’s actually about beer later today.*If you choose to read on, don’t say we didn’t warn you!

We’ve been reflecting lately on our tendency to self-censor. We used to shelve posts quite frequently, finished and illustrated, because, at the last minute, we found ourselves anticipating a bad-tempered response and couldn’t be bothered to face it.
But we’ve decided to change tack as our skin has got thicker, and as we’ve realised that, however carefully we tread, we still manage to wind people up anyway. Because they like being wound-up.
We’ve also been rethinking the purpose of blogging: we increasingly use it to get thoughts and ideas off our chests — to put them into words, as part of the process of digestion,*almost more for our own benefit than anyone else’s.
Sometimes, we even find ourselves disagreeing with what we’ve written 10 minutes after its gone live.
Being told off for*snobbery, CAMRA-bashing, ‘craft’-bashing, anti-local sentiments, anti-corporate sentiments, pretentiousness, factual errors, failing to chime with someone else’s 30-year-old memory, being too young, being too old, having poor palates, lack of support for pubs, naming names, not naming names, and a million other offences, is all part of the fun.
(It doesn’t always feel like fun when an excessively blunt comment pops up*at breakfast-time or just before bed, mind.)
It’s a good way to learn (Cunningham’s Law) and also helps us form more solid, less*‘floaty’ opinions, or to change our view altogether in response to convincing arguments.
More rants, please

We’ve seen a few other bloggers lately present something they’ve written as ‘a*rant’ when, in fact, it’s nothing of the sort, but rather a perfectly reasonable statements of what they are feeling and thinking at that moment, open to challenge and debate.
Posts like that liven up the conversation and get people talking. They reveal unresolved tensions and help us understand the prejudices of others. If we let them.
Let’s have more*half-baked opinions.
Who’s click-baiting?

There’s a fine line between speaking your brains and being wilfully attention-seeking, and we’ve seen the accusation of ‘click-baiting‘ bandied about a few times in the beer blogoshire.
We’d define it as:

  • Using deliberately controversial headlines and link text to lure readers to an otherwise rather boring blog post.
  • Stating a point of view that you do not hold — that no reasonable person could hold — for the sake of winding people up. (Trolling, basically.)

That is, Huffington Post, Upworthy, Buzzfeed behaviour.
Not a beer blogger stating a slightly*unusual preference for*Stella Artois, or holding a non-mainstream opinion about pub companies.
Revisiting a hot-button comments-and-clicks-guaranteed topic such as BrewDog, or the price of craft beer isn’t (necessarily) click-baiting either. These are unresolved issues and people who have something new to say about them shouldn’t feel bad about saying it.
A final note on Twitter

Twitter is killing blogging, goes the argument, because people dash-off a quick 140 characters*rather than write a full post; or reply on Twitter rather than commenting.
The latter we think is a non-issue, and the former increasingly baffles us, because quite a bit of what we write these days is prompted*by what we read on Twitter.*This, for example, demands a post, and it’s going to get one later this week.
Our standing page on blogging etiquette is here, if you want more of this kind of thing for some mad reason.
Blogging About Blogging: Speak Your Brains!


More...