I spent the last weekend at the The Green Man Music Festival. Green Man, held just a few miles from the University in the Crickhowell is rapidly become known as one of the best music festivals in the UK - here's the Guardian review.
The festival is very loosely a folk festival (but don't let that put you off - I'll explain in a moment) organised by local musicians Jo and Danny. Jo and Danny have their own interpretation of folk, so we aren't talking Cambridge Folk Festival here. The music includes more tradition folk (we had Donovan in the 'old timer' slot this year!), folktronica (Adem, Tunng), Americana (Silver Jews, Calexico), a whole bunch of singer songwriters (John Smith was my pick), local leftfield greats (Ghuff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, Euros Childs of Zorkys), and the ever wonderful King Creosote from Scotland to name just a few.
The Festival has run for four years and has grown from a one day event for 350 people to a three day, three stage. 5000 people festival without loosing any of its charm and atmosphere. This year it had the most stunning location of any festival I've every been to, at Glanusk Park, a beautiful estate nestling under the Brecon hills
Unlike many festivals a lot of people go to Green Man to the hear people they haven't heard of before, rather than those they know. My favourite new discovery were the appallingly named Shady Bard - have a listen on MySpace. Sadly I'm not the only one impressed - their debut (and only) EP recently fetched over £60 on eBay.
Some interesting stats on blogs here:
http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000436.html
The stats are from Technorati, and show that the number of bloggers has doubled every six months for the last three years.
I was particulary interested in the language breakdown, which shows that Japanese and English are about the same with around 33% and 34% respectively. I found this interesting as it shows blogging is a cross-cultural phenonomen.
Obviously blogsphere can't carry on growing at that speed (there aren't enough people!) but I wonder whether it will flatten or just burst at some point.