Saturday, April 16, 2011

Let's Blog about Blogs

Third post this Saturday. I've learnt a lot about PvP rules so far, but I also feel that I should have thought more and posted less. Anyway - let's have a little break from the serious stuff and talk about blogging itself.
First I'd like to encourage you to check out two new blogs by Max and Gilded. While Max is a long time commenter on my (and many other) blogs, Gilded joined us some weeks ago.

Max's blog: Armchair Design
Gilded's blog: Alt Notes

Now, about this blog. I officially started in September 2009, but had a break from from Januar 2010 to April 2010. Tobold had encouraged me to stop overtaking his blog and put my thoughts into my own blog. A good advise. We're not exactly friends *smile* and disagree on more than we agree. But, for what it's worth: Thank you, Tobold. :)

The first few tries were rather disappointing. Although I got a HUGE jumpstart thanks to Tobold, it waned off just as fast. Also, I wasn't exactly sure what to blog about. The first try was to write down my perfect MMORPG split up into many, many blog posts. It failed miserably. I deleted that blog soon after. MMORPGs are extremely complex. Writing a complete design document is a full-time job. One that shouldn't be undertaken alone. You need people to discuss things with; intelligent people.

So I concentrated on picking specific topics. Which worked. Often I got the creative impulse from another blog. With time I learnt that breaks come and go - as do those periods during which you write and write and write and write. Like today. I'm not restricting myself in any way. The aim is not to make a successful blog, but to blog as much as I want and get a successful blog by the way. So far it works.

So, how popular is this blog exactly? Fortunately there is Google Analytics. I started to use it about a year ago in June 2010.

Here are five graphs:





10 comments:

  1. I bow before your significantly larger e-peen.

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  2. You think that's good? Honestly, I don't know what's good. I guess that compared to Larísa or Tobold this is nothing.
    Anyway, keep bowing :)

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  3. I get around 250 a day, so quite a bit fewer. I don't remember any numbers for them, except that they were a lot bigger. Orders of magnitude bigger. Oh well.

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  4. Believe it or not but I didn't get all that more hits than that. When I quit blogging I had about 1900 subsccribers, so far from the amounts of Tobold or Gevlon. And the question is how many of those subscribers that really read the blog and how many that just hadn't bothered unsubscribing....

    It's really hard to measure the success of a blog. You could as well look at impact: how many other blogs will link to your blog. The "massivly blip" something - can't remember its name - took that in account when they ranked blogs. But I'm afraid it's gone now.

    Anyway: I think it was a blessing when you started a blog of your own. Not only do you write thinkworthy posts - it also meant that Tobold's comment section became more reasonable with a mix of voices - rather than a tête à tête between Tobold and Nilse.

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  5. Thank you so much for mentioning me! I really appreciate the warm welcome from the blogging community! Hopefully I can get that many visitors someday :D

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  6. Thanks for mentioning my blog .

    I found your blog trough Tobold ,I thought you made insightful constructive commentaries .

    For me personally your blog is a better than tobolds , so now your blog is pretty much my start page for mmo blogs. That roll on a side - contributes to it (found a few great blog trough it as well) :)

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  7. Klepsacovic, it seems you are the one with the larger e-peen. ;)
    I have about 1000 unique visitors a month, but only about 100 unique visitors a day. That means that most of these 1000 never come back. Which makes sense looking at the nature of this blog.
    This blog is also rather young. During the last 30 days, for example, I had 27% new visitors.

    Laría, an honor. I still hope you start up blogging about MMORPGs in general; that you move your inn somewere in the void and start discussing earthly issues from there.
    I still get more links from your blog roll than from any other! On the other hand, the readers from your blogroll also spend the least time on my blog :)

    Gilded, you're welcome. I was waking up one morning, checking my email and had like seven new comments. I was like 'woa!' Then I realized they were all written by this new guy ;)

    Max, thanks for switching, but no need for comparisions. Tobold has a very different kind of blog with a very different focus. I still greatly enjoy his blog for the discussions going on.

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  8. Well done, Nils. :) I also agree with Larísa's last statement. It's nice that you've got a place where you can express yourself without getting into a page-filling personal debate with Tobold every time, and you do have interesting things to say!

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  9. Oh, and it's nice to see that "The Fun Fallacy" is your top viewed post, because it's still one of the most thought-inspiring posts on MMO design that I've ever read.

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  10. Apparently I can't read. More news at nine.

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