If anybody has been missing Really Simple Beer Syndication, the American “beer blog aggregator”, since it went down apparently never to rise again a couple of months ago, a very nice chap called Pelle Stridh has put together a site called All About Beer which aggregates the feeds of all your favourite beer bloggers from the UK and Ireland in one place, with a few extras tossed onto the pile as well.
Pelle (I’m so glad this is the webternets and not radio, as I have no clue how to pronounce his name) is a Swedish beer fan and runs a similar site in Sweden. Now, out of the great goodness of his Nordic heart, he’s done the same for us here in the British Isles, and I for one will be buying him several pints when (as I hope one day to) I meet him to thank him: there are a couple of British beer bloggers who have automatically updating lists of the latest from other people’s blogs, but neither, understandably, is comprehensive. This is a service the British Isles beer blogging community needed, and now, thanks to a Swede, we have it.
All About Beer currently has more than 20 different beer blogs listed, in order of most recent postings, each with the first 20 to 30 words of the post, which gives a good flavour of what each post is about. The site is neatly laid out, although orange wouldn’t be my choice for the colour of the heads and subheads, there are fuller listings of recent blog titles from Wikio’s top British Isles beer blogs and lists of postings from North America’s top beer bloggers as well, plus news from Camra, RealBeer, Beer Advocate and the New York Times (lovely piece there on the Taybeh brewery in the West Bank which I’m glad to have been directed to – thanks for that, too, Pelle).
Get over there, take a look, add your suggestions, criticisms and comments: Pelle has already tweaked the name because I told him the Beer Nut wouldn’t like being filed under “UK”, he seems a friendly chap willing to take suggestions, and he deserves all the support we can give him.
Neato!
And it’s just as well that people who object to the term “British Isles” have trouble dragging their knuckles up to keyboard height or there’d be comments about that too.
Don’t get me started … I object to having to give my nationality as British, when as far as I am concerned, my nationality is English. But I do accept that I live on an island called Britain and in an archipelago known as far back as the 3rd century BC, at least, as the British Isles.
And, most importantly, in a political entity called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for which, to the best of my knowledge, the relevant adjective is “British”.
(I, for the record, have no objection to being referred to as a British Beer Blogger, since I am one, though I no longer live in the UK.)
I am shocked at your lack of early 1980s National Hockey League knowledge. The Philadelphia Flyers had a great goalie named Per-Eric Göran “Pelle” Lindbergh or “Pell-lay” to all we Canadians who made up the majority of the fan base.
Mmmm, yes, that would be “ice” hockey, the sport that means the original game now has to be referred to by the retronym “field hockey”, as the invention of the electric guitar meant the original instrument, once just a guitar, now has to be called an “acoustic guitar”.
@Allan: To pronounce it like “Pell-lay” would be typical american, I should describe it more like “Pell-eh” (almost like pellets without the ending “ts”).
@Martyn: Thanks for mentioning “All about Beer” and the kind words. Looking forward to you buying me that pint 😉 Cheers
Actually the pub review site Pubs Galore has been doing the same job for months. It’s run by two lads from Bristol on a non-commercial basis.
Thanks for letting me know about that one, Snudge, the Pubs Galore Blog Tracker – it’s here – looks an excellent effort too, but they need to do some serious marketing of this feature: I found Pelle’s site because it was turning up on my “referrers” list, but the Pubs Galore Blog Tracker does not appear among my referrers – so either nobody has clicked on their site to get to mine yet, or, more generously, no trace is left on my blog when they do. Thus I didn’t know of its existence. Come on, Pubs Galore – start emailing a few beer bloggers, let them know you have this service available, and you’ll start to see your hits rise.
Thanks Snudge for mentioning us.
Martyn, the Blog Tracker is something we got going to try and promote good beer sites and articles from our forum and left to see how it evolved (too much work too little time). It has not been used as much as we hoped and I think we have floundered a little in seeing how it slots into everything else on the site.
Your advice that we should be contacting the featured blogger’s is spot on and seeing this has reminded me I need to revisit it and see how we can better promote blogs through our site.
@Snudge: I just checked up the “Pubs Galore” and I wouldn’t exactly say it’s the same job they’re doing. On their site you still just see a long list of blogs and the title of the latest entry….
Perhaps I’m missing something here, but I still can’t say it’s “the same job”….