B...LIP

A very Happy New Year to you all, and we hope 2016 will be an exciting year for everyone.

We’re starting the year by celebrating all that is great about Blip, and sharing why we’ve put time, money and effort into the Blipfuture campaign to buy the site and save it. If you’ve not yet heard that the community is trying to buy the site to run for ourselves and to avoid closure, please look at the series of Blip Central posts (starting here, and working forwards), and the crowd funding site here.

It has been said that 10% of all photographs ever taken in the world were taken in the past year. Facebook reportedly hosts 4% of all photos ever – 140 billion of them. Contrast that with this fantastic site, with a few thousand dedicated members and a limit of just one photo a day and it’s a world apart. It's special.

We don’t head out into all weathers to find our daily “facebook”; we don’t connect with people to arrange a “tweetmeet”. The verb “to blip” has made it so firmly into not only our vocabulary, but that of our family and friends, that it is simply part of our lives now. Our daily blip gets us out of the house and in search of new and interesting things on so many days. Friendships have been forged from the blip journal pages. The creativity, interest and humour shown in the site is phenomenal.

Like so many on here, our blip journey has gone from a personal challenge to complete a 365, to the discovery of a community unlike any other we’ve found on the Internet. Positive, supportive, inclusive and friendly – the people on this site are what make it. Whether you meet them in person, or only ever interact via comments, this site gives you an opportunity to explore the ordinary and extraordinary in the world every day.

We found very quickly on our blip journey that one of the things we valued the most from the site was the inspiration we took from others’ images and words. Every hour of every day there is a different set of subjects, places and techniques to learn from within the pictures. But it’s not just about the pictures here – the words behind the images are what complete the story. Whether it’s celebrating a big life event, helping others through the tougher periods in their lives, or seeing an ordinary slice of life in a far off land – it’s all just so interesting. And it’s not just us that thinks so - Blipfoto was chosen by the British Library as one its "100 Websites" judged to be essential reading for future generations.

So for us, when we were given the opportunity to work towards saving Blipfoto for the community, we just couldn’t say no. We had to try.

Please think about what blip means to you, and consider pledging at https://www.blipfuture.com. If you have any questions for us at Blipfuture, you can mail us at info@blipfuture.com. We hope this set of blip-themed blips today will have worked to reach a few more people that were unaware of Blipfuture before, and will prompt them to make up their own minds. That’s all we ask.

Thank you to you all for blipping, and thank you blip for changing our lives so positively.

Like a number of our blips, Annie is the gurning idiot in the picture, and Chris is behind the lens. We passed through this village on the way home from a lovely New Year’s celebration with great friends Reg and Sandra; and on the way to a fabulous lunch with other great friends Kate and Martin. Sometimes, you just drive right past these blipportunites!