Tonight was the Blogging event at Light House in Wolverhampton with Steve from Creative Wolverhampton, Stef from 3form and my good blogging self so it would be shockingly remiss of me not to blog about it, especially after having told everyone how darned easy blogging is.

It was a fun little event although turnout was much higher than I was expecting. I’d been told these Out of Hours things were low-key chatty affairs in the cafe but when I stood up to give my “hello this is what I know come ask me stuff” talk there were loads of eyes looking my way. Ooh, I dunno, 30-40 people? And only one of them admitted to having a blog.

So I explained in five minutes what a blog was. Probably a bit dry but I felt it necessary to go through the basics. A blog consists of a bunch of posts, which in turn have a title, body and date. They live on a site archived by date and category and that’s about it. I did a bit about the importance of linking (natch) and mentioned the word “blogosphere” with a disclaimer. What I really wanted to get over was how simple it all is.

What I didn’t want to get into in that intro was what you actually do with your blog, though of course that’s what everyone wants to know. They’ve heard about these here things called blogs but they have no idea what they’re for, other than they should have one. It’s kinda reminiscent of original dot.com boom when everyone felt they had to have a website in order to… well, they didn’t know really. But they needed one.

I had some interesting chats as the hours rushed by. One lady brought along a clipping from the Guardian – one of those G2 filler pieces about how all the kids are stuck in front of MySpace and Facebook and not actually meeting in the flesh. Which is of course patent nonsense. So I showed her my Facebook profile and demonstrated how social networking sites are just an extension of real world relationships, not an impersonal replacement for them and that the social web is no different to the social world – it just works in different dimensions.

A near trick I stumbled upon was walking people through setting up a blog on Blogger. This is so easy now it’s almost embarrassing. Once you’re signed up to Blogger it’s a two set process and, boom, we’re publishing on the web. For people who’d suspected this blogging stuff was an arcane art of geekery this was quite a revelation.

A couple of people were wondering how to best use blogs (or rather “blogs” as they didn’t really know what a blog was at that stage) in projects involving young people. One woman in particular did film workshops across Herefordshire and had a geographically disparate group of people who she wanted to tie together somehow as a community so they could share their work and self-critique. Another woman had a similar sort of project (I stupidly forget the details now…) involving teenagers documenting their work. The trick here seemed to be firstly how do you encourage participation and secondly, if this sort of thing is already going on (say on MySpace or whatnot) how do you best collate it. My advice was, with qualifications, to lead by example. With the former I suggested her keeping a blog-journal of each workshop or whatnot and making it clear that participation was welcome. With the latter I suggested letting them create their own blogs, either on Blogger or MySpace, and then tying these all together on the main project site, allowing the kids their autonomy but still maintaining a coherent whole.

And there were other chats, though not enough really. Suddenly it was 7pm and everyone was going home for their dinner. Still, I got a lot out of the evening. There’s definitely an audience for this sort of thing, if only to reassure people how easy it all is. It reminded me of a Saturday job a friend had a Birmingham Library circa-1998 helping people set up Hotmail accounts. You wouldn’t dream of offering that sort of service now for email and yet setting up and running a blog is just as simple. I posited to Light House the vague notion of running some kind of workshop like that, perhaps tied in with a YouTube intro since they do a lot of film and animation work there. And there were lots of other thoughts, especially with Stef on the drive back, which I won’t delve into right now.

Finally, of course, Light House is a lovely place with lovely people. It’s almost enough to make me consider moving to Wolverhampton. But not quite.