15 Feb. 2013, and after

The BIB editor writes:

On Friday 15 February, four weeks from today (as announced on 17 December last), I'll be retiring from editing bluegrass blogs, and the BIB will not continue as it has done for the last seven years. The basic reason is that for me, keeping a blog active every day, or even just ready for action every day, needs too great an investment of time.

As mentioned in the original announcement, the many kind words that friends have said about the BIB and its usefulness are greatly appreciated, and I realise that its complete disappearance would leave a large and steep hole. Any kind of calendar or other online medium on which people can enter their own news would need daily supervision to keep junk and the like off it; and for this reason, I'm shelving the idea.

I am contemplating keeping the BIB open as a kind of directory - with links to festival websites, to band websites, and to select venue websites, so that readers can make their own checks on what may be happening. It would be possible to highlight a link to a website where significant new information has become available. This, together with the existing links displayed on the BIB's front page, would make a good deal of information accessible without heavy maintenance.

For some friends of the BIB, though, even this level of activity would be a regrettable fall away from the day-by-day responsiveness of the BIB in the past. I can only say that if anyone (and again, I recommend that it should be more than one) is prepared to keep up the kind of flow of information that I've tried to keep on the BIB, such an undertaking will have my full approval. If you want to discuss this, please e-mail me.

But in any case, this isn't the end of the world; even 21 December 2012 was not quite what some of us expected.