I’ve been blogging and podcasting for quite a few years now and although I enjoy both mediums, they do come with a degree of work. Also both undertakings require financing and at times can be quite costly. Yet despite these aspects of content creation, I still enjoy both mediums as a participant and as a consumer. There are still plenty of great blogs out there as well as informative and engaging podcasts. If anything 2015 was very much the year of the podcast as Serial proved. I consider reading blogs, listening to podcasts and watching quality You Tube channels to be the equal of commercial television and believe that these mediums will increasingly compete against more traditional platforms in the coming years. Here are some of the shows that I view and listen to:

· The Infinite Monkey Cage (A BBC science podcast with Professor Brian Cox and Comedian Robin

· The Secret History of Hollywood (A movie podcast featuring historical analysis and debate)

· Writing Excuses (A podcast about creative writing and its respective techniques)

· Noah Coldwell-Gervais (You Tube channel featuring in-depth games essays and analysis)

· Every Frame a Painting (You Tube channel featuring movie analysis and technical criticism)

· GnC Films (You Tube channel specialising in comparing different versions of movies and exploring regional variations and cuts)

I moved my blog in August 2015, which was a hard decision. For the previous twelve month Contains Moderate Peril has been generously hosted by Host1Plus at no cost. Despite being very happy with the service provided, the website itself had a wealth of legacy posts from previous incarnations of the blog and was rife with formatting issues, broken links and missing content. Rather than attempt to fix the problem, which meant manually amending and republishing over eight hundred posts, I decided to reboot the site from scratch. I also felt it was time to move away from Word Press and so chose to use Squarespace for my hosting needs. It can be hard to see a lot of your content vanish from the internet overnight but overall this was the prudent thing to do.

Perhaps the biggest change regarding my blogging and podcasting in 2015 was my choice of content. When I started writing back in 2007 I was focused on one game. I soon discovered that this was quite restrictive and over time merged my different blogs into one. It would appear that I have more to say other than discussing gaming and movies and in recent months the topics of debate, especially on Burton & Scrooge podcast have become quite broad. I intend to continue this approach into 2016 as I feel that I’ve exhausted some topics over the last seven years. Whether these wider subjects will chime with existing readers and listeners remains to be seen. It will be interesting to see my end of year summary next December.

A Year in Blogging and Podcasting