Some initial thoughts are:

DiG started out as a purely voluntary thing (which it still is) with quite a rough brief – ‘cover the arts/cultural stuff in Digbeth , and whatever else you feel like’.

It’s kind of became more personalised as I gained confidence in blogging. I don’t think this is a bad thing – people seemed to react well to that and DiG wouldn’t have gotten so much of my time, effort, attention and care if I didn’t love it so much.

This will happen with other ‘hyper-local’ sites people do – although they’ll be about and serve communities the fact that people will devote so much to them means they will become emotionally invested in them. Take BiNS, for example, would that be half of what it is if Jon Bounds didn’t give as much of himself to it as he does?

I love the fact that the Birmingham blogging community has helped and enabled me to develop DiG. It’s been brilliant – I’ve gotten so much of people’s time, expertise, advice and technical help since I started because that’s the amazingly supportive nature of this network.

Saying that, you’ve really hit the nail on the head with this post – I do sometimes feel pressure from people to take things in a certain direction when perhaps I’m not ready to go there yet. Not that I don’t welcome advice and suggestions – please, keep it coming. But I’m not going to always want to necessarilly follow it, ay least not straight away. Stef’s suggestion that I perhaps start lookng for someone else to hand the reigns to isn’t something I feel ready to do yet – there are still other things I want to do with DiG, ideas I want to try out. But saying that, months ago Will Perrin suggested I lighten my load by building up a team and I initially wasn’t keen on the idea. Now recruiting new authors and building up more of a team is precisely what I’m doing! I’ll get to these places and take these decisions when I feel ready.

I guess what I’m saying is that although DiG is about Digbeth, therefore about and for a community, the fact that I’m devoting so much time and effort to it, purely for the love of it, means it feels quite personal and precious to me. So I suppose I need to feel I can take it in the direction that I want. What to do if people feel I should be doing it differently? An interesting question. Thank you for posing it!

Nicky.