Farewell to MBIweb

In 2006 Mike Werner of MotorBiker.org came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea, an association for the burgeoning ranks of people so obsessed with their motorcycles that if they weren't riding them they were writing about riding them. Thus the tag line, "Riding and writing, that's what we do". Mike's idea was to create a community and see if we could build a voice that would be unique to the rider community - the non-professional riders, as opposed to professional motorcycle journalists. His idea (as I intuited it) was that what caught the attention of a professional journalist might be (and likely was) different than what would catch our attention, and he wanted to see if he could put a megaphone on that un-represented voice of the consumer.

He had an idea to focus this community of oddballs - an awards contest for the best and the worst of the motorcycling community - products - people - phenomena - in a calendar year. The first year we had good participation, and it seemed to be fun for everyone. The 2008 participation dropped. The award nominations were still interesting, and the winners were entertaining, but Mike and the man behind the curtain, PHP programming wizard Richard, were not seeing the level of interest that would justify the effort and money needed to keep the infrastructure for the site going. Mike tried sweet talk, he tried kick starting. A few days ago he made the right decision and pulled the plug on what he called the brain dead MBIweb organization.

I was delighted to be the awards administrator in 2008 but other than the awards, I really didn't participate in the forums on MBIweb and hadn't visited the site since the 2008 awards had been announced. Many people joined for the cool logo and to increase their own readership. I don't spend much time on forums until I'm looking for advice or a review of a bike, a component or accessory. So when Mike pointed out that the site had been down for a few days, and no one had noticed - ouch, that hit home and hurt.

You would think that 202 rider/writers from around the world would be able to create something - perhaps Mike's vision is ahead of its time. I'm sad to see Motorcycle Bloggers International back fire, still, if you don't fail once in a while, you aren't trying hard enough so I say, damn good job, Mike. You did your best, I loved the fact that the awards allowed me to highlight women riders in this blog. Thank you for trying.