eBothy Blog

These days it seems there is a glut of media available to us outdoors lot. There is the traditional book, there are blogs, there are podcasts and now there are vidcasts. But is there anything worth reading/listening to out there? Build more roads on the information superhighway and just like the tarmac equivalent, more vehicles will use them. Note that there’s no guarantee of the quality of the traffic. The new lanes are just as likely to fill up with old bangers and wrecks, as they are with DB9s and Jags. Bloggers travel in all the lanes of the new highway. There are plodding caravans and polluting wrecks, barfing digitial bumpf into the ether every 2mins. These are the micro-bloggers. They blog everything about their lives, in the minutest detail and they are starting to fill the inside lanes of the highway. Move out a lane and you are in the territory of the traditional bloggers. Still some caravans and wrecks but mainly “reasonably priced cars” as Jeremy Clarkson would say. Their offerings are worth reading. The new vidcasts occupy the fast lane of the highway. It takes a fair amount of work to produce a vidcast, e.g. here’s Cameron McNeish’s exhortation to buy December’s TGO magazine. I quite like Cameron’s wee vidcasts as they lighten up a dreary day at work. However, as with all powerful vehicles, put them in the hands of the inexperienced and you end up with a super-wreck, especially in the fast lane of the highway!

So what’s actually out there? Well let’s start with the inside lane, the land of micro-blogging. One I’ve seen so far that is worth reading is AktoMan’s blog. I’d say this was sort of a micro-blog but the pictures are good and the content is quite interesting. In one of his posts, he collates all the information he’s blogged about his health, printed it out and taken it to the physio. Us semantic web types call it “knowledge in the world”. Why remember everything when you have a blog? Another one is Bearded Git’s blog. I’d say this was a bit of a micro-blog too as it the hallmarks of micro-blogging. Little updates of what’s going on in the author’s life. However, it sort of strays around between the lines as it also has some interesting posts on everyday life. I quite enjoyed this one. Another good one from BG’s blog is this post. Although I’ve called these blogs micro-blogs, they are much better than the real micro-bloggers who stub their toe and blog it.

Moving out to the middle lane, the blogs start to contain long posts, articles or features that span posts. I was surprised out here. There really is a lot of good stuff out there. I draw particular inspiration from Dave MacLeod. Some of his writing is exceptional. For example, his philosophy of hard climbing is fascinating and his account of putting up the new E10 in the Cairngorms is superb. If Dave ever writes a book, I will be camping outside Waterstones to get the first copy!

I’ve found other blogs that have lengthy posts about technical things, such as modifying kit and theoretical articles about backpacking and load carrying and all that. But to stay with history and philosophy, I’ve been reading the Summit Dreams blog for a while now and this post just stood out instantly. Short but really nice writing. It struck a chord with me. The blog also has a couple of articles on mountaineering history, part 1, part 2, which are well written and informative. And all this from an author whose name I neither know nor can find! Another good blog is Ali and Lay’s Mountaineering Blog, which has fast lane vidcasts too. I quite liked the ascent of Ledge Route.

I could go on and on but those are just flavours of what’s out there on the information superhighway. In the UK, we might not have mountain huts in the remote wilds but our minds can backpack the highway, refreshing themselves from the many blogging pit stops along the way. It really is refreshing to see so much good writing out there.

And where does the eBothy blog sit? Well, I would hope I’d be in the middle lane. Perhaps swerving now and then into the slow lane until I write another article. Perhaps I’ll try a vidcast one day but in the meantime I’m working on a podcast about the Cuillin.

If anyone reading this would like to point out more interesting blogs please do so. I’m off for a cuppa and a read…