Guardian Cardiff Local Blog Experiment Ending

First day back to work sees me chasing a long line of Emails and messages. One of these in particular is quite sad and that is news of the cessation of the Guardian Local Blogs. For me, the Cardiff Guardian Local Blog has been immensely useful. When I talk about their blog, clearly I mean Hannah. In almost everything I come across, it is always individuals that make the difference and one of my main drives is that I hope I make a difference. Looking in on Hannah's blog I believe it has truly made a difference in Cardiff.

As a newcomer to blogging and displaying some of my work via Flickr and Tweeting etc I greatly appreciate the support that Hannah has given towards my own justification for spending all those extra hours on top of my normal hours pursuing this "modern" line of work. The greatest example of Hannah's help was when I created a Google Map showing all of the 105 or so Tidy Wales Week Events across Cardiff last September. The effort for me to create this map was huge, where several people suggested it was a waste of precious time. Perhaps they were right, after all it was generating relatively few hits (low hundreds) as beautiful and positive as it was. Hannah was impressed with the map and supported it by putting the map on her front page and suddenly thousands were looking at it. This rose up to just over 29,000 hits all down to the success of the Guardian's "experiment". It demonstrated quite clearly to me and importantly my colleagues the worth of embracing social media.

The next success was attending one of Hannah's social media meet ups where I was partnered with a local blog star @gavomatic57. Here he saved me hours of work and helped me tweak what I was doing to improve both my efficiency and effectiveness.

Hannah's blog content has a tremendous volume of positivity which is a difficult thing to achieve where negativity is so easily a driver for attention and conversation. There are so many good things happening all over Cardiff and the Guardian Local Blog manages so beautifully to capture so very much of this. Finally I return to an earlier mantra that "individuals make the difference" and as a published scientist I'd say the Guardian Local experiment is a tremendous success and a real shame to bring it to an end.