I remember when Renegade Conservatory Guy was going years ago and enjoyed reading through his posts when he was still writing. It gave me the push to get DGB going and have a crack at it myself. And there was a time when both were going at the same time. In fact I remember a couple of other new ones cropping up at roughly the same time as well. There threatened to be a real movement in the industry blogging area of our industry. But after what was a promising start, it all tailed off really quickly.

Industry worthy of bloggers

When you look at the size of the industry, it’s a fairly hefty one. Worth a rough £4bn, and has a direct effect on every single building in the UK. It plays an important role in advanced building techniques like Passivhaus. It employs tens of thousands of people up and down the country. It plays a big role in the general chain of construction. In my opinion our industry has more influence than it’s actually given credit for. So where are all the bloggers?

You look at other industries like technology, food, cars, interior decor, TV, film – the list goes on – there are tons of independent sites which review, analyse, critique, predict and cover their own sectors and do a damn good job at it. Yet in comparison, ours is flagging way behind. The traditional media doesn’t count, other than the odd guest post or editorial column much of the material is advertorial. Same goes for plenty of industry websites. What I’m talking about here are genuine independent magazine websites which tackle all sorts of areas of our industry.

When I set up DGB, I wanted to cover as many areas as I felt I could. I wanted to analyse, critique, attack, review and do many other things to do with our industry from an independent view. If you want to take a look at how other websites do it in their own industry, take a look at The Verge.

And before the nit-pickers start nit-picking, DGB is still independent as the sponsored stuff is separate to what I write and it doesn’t change the way I write myself or the subjects I choose to tackle!

More industry bloggers would be a good thing

When you look at the number of well known industry characters, and lets face it, over-inflated egos, it’s surprised me how few opinion based blogs have ever been around. And in the end that’s a sad thing. It means that the opinions of some of the industry’s biggest voices become restricted to the odd guest publication in a magazine or a monthly guest column which gets lost in the noise of all the other industry traffic.

More industry bloggers would be a good thing for this industry. And I mean proper bloggers. People who are prepared to write articles honestly, confronting genuine industry topics, reviewing products, generating debate about issues dominating this sector. The more the industry engages with itself, the more I believe we can create movements of change.

An industry with as much influence and value as this one has, there should be way more independent and magazine-type sites covering the sector. This is why the prospect of RCG being booted up again excites me. In what guise version 2 might be remains to be seen, but I hope that perhaps with DGB and RCG on the scene at the same time again, it might spur a few others to take a crack at it.

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