…the neon hub blog…

NEON had the pleasure of spending Friday evening in the city of Leeds to meet local bloggers. The meeting was held at Azucar, a South American inspired tapas and cantina bar in Brewery Wharf. The bar is partly owned by Howard Marks who lives nearby but evidently does not blog as all we saw of him were publicity shots on the walls.

The meeting was hosted by Havana Cultura – the cultural initiative from Havana Club. We all checked out the impressive website, discussed their Twitter campaign (launches October 19th), the Gilles Peterson/Havana Cultura CD launch (October 26th) and upcoming Havana Club parties planned for Leeds and Manchester.

During the evening NEON met a wonderful group of people, discovered an amazing array of blogs and had a real insight into localised blogging. In the big smoke blogging is prolific; industries are created such as The Underground Restaurant thanks to ease of communication, bloggers are recognised, respected and remunerated such as the Dos Hermanos with their book deal and what started life as the Slutty Fringe music blog has now turned into a go-to culture and lifestyle site. It’s exciting and fast moving and possibilities are endless – we all know the Belle Du Jour story and next in line for blogger exploitation is fashion (just)teen Tavi.

It was obvious from speaking to local bloggers that the unique magic of localised blogging was the desire to nurture community rather than their respective sites. As well as producing excellent blogs with great content there is a overriding communal pride for Leeds and the surrounding area.

NEON hopes that this will not be left behind when these blogs will inevitably be swept up and pushed into the limelight as it is this pride that produces such honest and entertaining reads accessible to all, whether you live in Leeds or not. See our previous post for the hot list.

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Huge congratulations to our friend and web designer Mark Jenkins who’s blog has been shortlisted in the Music category for The DAZED RAW BLOG AWARDS 2009.

Fried My little Brain is an MP3 Blog that ‘aims to provide you the newest (and old), music that melts our brains and dissolves our ears’. When we fancy a bit of brain melting here at NEON we are never disappointed with his selection of electro, Remixes, Techno and Dubstep. There is also some Drum n Bass, Grime, Bass and Wonk but we reserve that for Friday’s or when the printer stops working.

Fried My Little Brain is one of three top class blogs that makes up the Fublo Collective, alongside One Fat Seagull for tees and the UKStreetArt for, er, street art. Check out his blogs and please cast your vote, there is some competition but NEON thinks Fried My Little Brain takes the lead, championing everything a blog should be – accessible, updated, well designed and full of quality content.

The pinnacle of Jenkins’s career is yet to come, late nights toiling by candlelight juggling html and complex coding will soon be rewarded with the NEON site launch!

Vote for Mark here!

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It’s been a while since my bout of public speaking awards circa 1995 – and quite some time since I was thanked for ‘an interesting and thought provoking speech’ – but NEON’s appropriation of the most recent London Bloggers MeetUp went swimmingly and clients Fashion Targets Breast Cancer were super happy with the event. NEON decided it was about time bloggers and blog-readers influence were recognised and we organised the sponsorship of a LBM. The idea was to ask the aforementioned Blog lovers to advise on how well FTBC were communicating their first online campaign www.millionmodelcatwalk.com. The easy bit was arranging posters, a prize draw, live demos of the site, a £100 prize competition, some pretty cool USB flipcards plus plenty of food and drink, the tricky bit was a presentation to over 100 bloggers about how and what the campaign was doing online. All went well and we celebrated with loads of wine and tequila (apparently).

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