Offlar

If you went clubbing in Liverpool at any point over the last decade you probably visited Outlar.com at some point to browse line-ups, check out the city’ best flyers (seriously, there’s a great art to flyers) or simply lose some time on a frankly massive online clubbing resource.

However, amongst a lot of physical-world music scene closures, owner Paul Outlar recently announced that the site was to close. Though it goes without saying that we’re too old to have used it in a while, we’ll miss it.

But is this something to be sad about? Nostalgic, perhaps. Cities, scenes, societies change; ebb and flow; wax and wane. Change is part of life - and change happens quickly in big cities.

The site was created and run out of Liverpool - but its appeal went way beyond the city’s borders, thanks to exhaustive lists about what night were on in the city, at which venues, and featuring which DJs and MCs.

Clever tie-ups with social media meant that people could track of who was going where; and there you have a successful network of people creating a user-generated hyper-local site - the Holy Grail of the internet.

So, yes, it’s a shame it’s gone and all of that - but the web is fluid, unpredictable. It moves quickly. A statement on the Outlar site indicates that social networking platforms have all but made the site redundant.

Rather than mope about, we’d rather celebrtate an impressive achievement though. And the remainder of the site behind the front page still works, so you can lick your lips at those flyers, find out who was playing Django’s Riff in 2007 and reminisce about Ste and Terser.

However, owner Outlar says there are new projects on the horizon - and don’t get down at heart; as we said yesterday there are still plenty of reasons why Liverpool is brilliant.