Author Archive

After many months of deliberation, I have decided to lay the Club Mumble web site to rest.

When I launched ClubMumble.com almost five years ago, I was entrenched in the culture of skateboarding and an area where art and the sport I love intersected. I had contracts with action sports companies and was actively engaged in the industry which has provided me with so much in my lifetime, a creative outlet being the most appreciated of those gifts. I started the Club Mumble blog as a place where I could bring together all of the amazing humans I had met over the years and encourage them to share all of their influences and their current projects and collaborate with each other and foster a community and basically a hub to get the good word out.

Then I got really busy.

Shortly after I started this blog I started a hyper-local web site dedicated to sharing all of the “Awesome” things about my hometown of Vancouver, BC, which I had moved back to from LA in 2004. And that project really took off. Over the past two years it has completely swallowed me whole, is now more than full time, and I haven’t had the time (nor the inclination somehow) to take on outside projects like I once did, or to actively engage with this network. It’s showing. And it’s been showing for a while now.

Like any project, if you let something sit for long enough without stoking the fire and tending to it and shaping it (or launching new Honoris Professio projects, etc), it gets old. And it gets obsolete as new technologies come in and make it easier and easier to publish. I’ve been publishing online since 1997 when I started the first online skateboarding magazine (Pacific Skateboarding, remember that?) and if I know one thing for certain about myself it is that I have to dedicate myself completely to something or else I simply can’t be involved in it; I have an all or nothing kind of personality. I knew it was near the end for me and Mumble more than a year ago, so a few months ago I reached out to some trusted folks whom I had brought on as Mumblers and I asked them if they might want to license this thing, if they might want to turn it into a viable business for themselves so that one of the things that happened to me – I couldn’t justify spending time on it because it didn’t pay the bills like my other project – wouldn’t happen. I figured we could work out some sort of licensing deal where I would take a small percentage of advertising dollars every year in exchange for what I’ve created here and they could take the ball and run with it. It was a final kick at the can as I knew it was hobbling along on one leg, with a blog post every few days as opposed to the multiple ones we used to see every day, and I wasn’t going to be able to mend it so I figured a deal where someone had a vested interest in it might ensure its future.

I was wrong. The folks I approached with that proposal shunned it and treated me as if I was Arianna Huffington trying to make away with big riches made off of the backs of volunteers. The reality is that I have volunteered a lot over the five years this site has been live: I formed this thing as a promotional tool for everybody involved, and I can’t keep it going in good faith anymore, and I don’t see anyone else stepping in to take it on by the horns, despite my best efforts. I’m done.

So I’m closing the book on this chapter of Club Mumble. No longer an active blog, this site will now act as a time capsule for all of the super interesting projects that the members of our Club have shared here over the past few years.

Thanks to everyone who accepted the invitation to be a member of Club Mumble, who has contributed in any way whatsoever, even if it’s just being a member and having your face on the members page. Big thanks to Amber Dianda and Erich Lehman for bringing in new contributors in the recent years. Thanks to all of the readers who have come back to read this.

And most of all, thank you skateboarding.

If you need me, I’ll be over at VancouverIsAwesome.com and the CanadaIsAwesome.com network that we’re slowly rolling out. Leave a comment on this post if you’d like, and please feel free to email me at bobk@vancouverisawesome.com if you want to stay in touch. Maybe one day we’ll revive this ol’ club in another capacity, maybe not. Time will tell.

Your friend,
Bob K