In the spring of 2008, I signed up to participate in a new “blogging challenge” organized by Dewey, the blogger behind The Hidden Side of a Leaf. In just over a year of blogging, Dewey had already emerged as a leader within the book-blogging community, and that community was her focus. 

Dewey had already launched the monthly Bookworms Carnival and the semi-annual 24-Hour Readathon when she started up the activity she called Weekly Geeks. The challenge would involve a weekly “assignment” – a question, a task, a theme – to be completed and posted on the Geeks’ individual blogs and linked up at the main assignment post. Visiting other Geeks’ posts for that week was part of the assignment as well, which is where Dewey’s community-building focus kicked in. Bloggers could participate every week or only when the assignment appealed to them – it was intended to be casual, and new participants were always welcome.

Dewey’s community was stunned on November 25, 2008, when her husband posted an announcement on her blog that she had died. Our shock and sense of loss drew us together, and many of us wanted to see her community-building activities live on. In early 2009, I became part of the team that set up a dedicated blog to continue Weekly Geeks.

Since then, I’ve been a behind-the-scenes organizer, a sometime participant in the assignments, a periodic poster of the link round-ups that concluded each assignment on the WG blog…and, earlier this summer, one vote in the difficult decision to bring this blogging challenge to a close. Participation had dwindled notably, particularly in the last few months, and that seemed like an indicator that the time had come

I tend to think that most memes have a life cycle, and after nearly three and a half years, Weekly Geeks has reached the end of a pretty long – and mostly good – run. I even wonder whether Dewey herself might have ended it earlier. The book-blogging community has been through a lot of changes since she left us; it’s both exploded in size and fragmented into ever-more-specialized niches. While annual events like the upcoming Book Blogger Appreciation Week and Armchair BEA do bring large numbers of us together to share and celebrate what we do, there are times when it’s very difficult to see us as one single “book-blogger community” any more.

And there are times I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. The whole community may be too much for one individual blogger to navigate, but within that whole, most of us manage to find our tribes, and we may find community in multiple places. I suspect that if Dewey were still with us, she’d be doing the same.

Many, many book blogs have come along since late 2008, and while some are already gone, a lot have stuck around…and they’ve never known a book-blogging community that included Dewey. Her blog archives have been taken down, so there’s no way they can get to know her now, either; and with the departure of Weekly Geeks, the original Dewey’s 24-Hour Readathon is her last remaining contribution to us (mark your calendars now for October 22!).

I’m glad Dewey was part of my book-blogging community, and that I’ve had the chance play a small part in keeping her community spirit going.

Wendy has posted a fine, bittersweet farewell to Weekly Geeks at its dedicated blog – please do check it out, and you’re welcome to join us in saying goodbye.