I just saw this on Konagod’s blog. Congratulations, Konagod, for making finalist in the best new blog category! But what stunned me is that there is a category for just about everything under the sun, except dance. Yet another instance of dance not being taken seriously in our culture. Yet there is an increasingly large number of blogs by dancers, choreographers, and dance enthusiasts and advocates, and there are a few excellent dance blog / websites that provide an invaluable service to the dance community, such as The Winger. Upon closer inspection, I found that the arts in general were profoundly underrepresented. I find this very disturbing; a society without a strong arts life is greatly lacking.
Get Your EBooks Signed!
How timely! I also posted earlier today about the dance blogging community.
The funny thing is that within the arts there is so much to write about, take pictures of, etc, it seems like the most natural thing in the world to blog about!
Hi Natalia — well, I posted a message on the awards site’s message board asking them to consider dance blogs as a category next year. Several others were commenting on other categories they thought were excluded as well. The judges said there have to be a certain number of blogs in any given area in order to be considered as a category, so it may be that the dance blogosphere is not huge enough yet. But hopefully it will be by next year, and we’ll have our own category!
Seriously!! How big is big enough, I wonder? Doug Fox’s site has 45 dance blogs on his blogroll, and I just found 10 more through the poster on Natalia’s site this morning. There must be at least several hundred active dance bloggers. I’m going to leave a message as well – and we should definitely pass the word along to the other dance bloggers we know (I’ll post on mine AFTER I finish this brief!).
I think the issue is less the *number* of dance blogs, and more the lack of interconnectedness of them. I think many of us are basically blogging in a vacuum, maybe interacting with a small handful of other bloggers.
In other blog communities, there seems to be a social norm of interaction, people put on “blog carnivals”, charity fundraisers, and other kinds of interactive community blog events. The dance blog community seems to have not yet reached a critical mass that can support these kinds of events. I don’t think we’ll be able to support that kind of stuff until we number in the thousands, not hundreds.
Though, for the purpose of blog awards, I don’t think it would be a crushing blow to combine dance, theater, and other arts blogs in a larger overall category.
Really, people put on blog carnivals and charity events? That sounds so cool!
I’m so new to blogging, I don’t really know any of these things. I hadn’t even known any such awards existed until I saw it on someone else’s (non-dance) blog. I also have no idea how big the dance blog community is. I find other blogs from either the blogrolls of other sites I visit, or people who comment on mine. I don’t know how else to find out … I guess our community is not very organized…
The knitting/weaving/spinning community put together a little real-life meet and greet in Central Park, and decided to do a little blog-based contest fundraiser for Heifer International to go along with it. The original goal was to raise $3,600. By the end of the event, they had raised $18,936! It was pretty amazing to see. (Not to mention the crazy amount of raffle prizes different stores and people donated) Here’s the site for it: http://www.spin-out.org/
And the latest edition of the Carnival of Art: http://artcarnival.wordpress.com/2006/11/22/the-carnival-of-art-7/
I’m already plotting starting a carnival of dance-related stuff, I think it would be a cool thing to help more dance bloggers get to know each other, reach across stylistic boundaries, etc. I’m hoping to post the question/invite next week, and the actual carnival of responses around the new year.
As for finding other blogs, I think the way you’re going about it is really the only way. But as more bloggers network with each other and expand their connections, it’s easier to follow those connections around the web. Can you tell I’ve been overthinking this a little lately?