Manchester Hermetically-sealed Bubble Awards 2009

This is a story about a bubble.  A tiny hermetically-sealed bubble within a beer froth of other hermetically-sealed bubbles left on the teak surface of a small table in a bar in Manchester.  Inside this bubble are a small group of mediocre 'writers' (I use the term loosely) who feel something is missing from their blogging:  appropriate appreciation from an audience.

Now then, one day one of these characters has a brain-wave.  Why not create a blog award just for Manchester? They can all nominate each other's blogs, give each other awards, and use the event itself to post press releases on numerous websites under the guise of 'social media news'.  They can target  main stream newspaper web sites (who are so busy embracing reader-generated content and getting the graduates in the newsroom to edit down the 'real' news stories for the brand new on-line version of the paper, that they haven't noticed that traditional journalistic values are vanishing around them); each other's blogs; and other literary-minded blogs which number into the thousands in the UK alone.

Some members of this desperate group occasionally write for the Manchester Evening News - but mostly in an on-line capacity you understand - these are not seasoned journalists or anything approaching that.  So, the MEN agree to 'sponsor' the event ("is £50 for the beer tab all right?") and now the full power of the social media machinery the Bubble People spend their lives trumpeting about can swing into operation...

At least three of them regularly contribute to "The Mancunian Way", a dry, bland parade of culture-related press releases which describes itself as "part of the Manchester Evening News website" and naturally includes links back to the authors' respective blogs.  The self-authored announcement of the Manchester Blog Awards 2009 is given  prominent airing on the site, describing organisers and contributors alike with such endearments as "Queen Blogger" and "Digital Gadfly" and listing all their friends' blogs as nominees for the prestigious(sic) award.  Also used and abused is "The Manchester Literature Festival Blog", another witless list that reads like a Sixth Form 'Today We Learned How To Write A Press Release' project.

Soon, the nominations are in:

But it seems it's impossible to share the list of 200 nominees due to 'technical difficulties'.  Or dare I say it, because the list is somewhat smaller than suggested.

Shortly afterwards the actual Manchester Blog Awards site itself is proud to announce:

You guessed it, Creative Tourist is nothing less than yet another commercially-minded blog set up by members of the original Blog Award consortium.  They may as well have written: "I'm happy to welcome my other website to this website and I'm sure I'll be getting involved in the same thing I'm already doing..." God, it gets confusing doesn't it?

The Guardian - like all other traditional newspapers a sucker for 'new media' news - ends up posting a curious piece written by one of the group that goes for a curiously old-fashioned "Women Dominate At Manchester Blog Awards" angle.

Anyway, the scheme works!  The event is a triumph!  Well, at least on it's own terms it's a success.  Don't believe me?  Well, let's take a trip to youtube where we can watch the heady moment when the winner was announced to rapturous applause from a packed, standing room only (though to be fair, somewhat smallish max. capacity 50 persons) room.  Interestingly this youtube clip was uploaded by a user called 'visitmanchester' whose channel links directly to visitmanchester.com, and is clearly joined at the hip with a Flickr user of the same name.  Flickr is not meant to be for commercial users -

and this cynical hijacking and abuse of media channels that are supposed to be uncommercial lies at the heart of small groups like this determined in their self-belief that they are important enough to be listened to, and interesting enough to win awards for their blogs - even if they did have to create the award in the first place.

I'm sure they'll continue to promulgate their writing on as many spurious blogs, websites, Twitter accounts and channels as they can happily ever after... or until that bubble they live in bursts.