f13.net

Top 100 Blogs for MMOG gamers (http://mythicalblog.com/blog/2006/12/08/top-100-blogs-for-mmo-gamers/).

What?

I liked Raph's chart (http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/12/09/the-mmo-blogosphere-map/) of it, using that TouchGraph thing from Google.

Otherwise, yea, F13's a community site. I'm sure your webhost tracks this, so I'd be interested to know how many people hit forums.f13.net versus www.f13.net, linking directly to the forums instead of the front page.

Frontpage has more unique users than the forums.

Which one is more sticky though? I get that uniques are important, but given the rate at which the front page is updated (not a dig, just a fact), I can't see how the uniques stick there long. How many are from Google bots and MMOZ type stuff?

The reason I'm asking is because I casually rate a site either as a blog or a community based on where all the obvious activity is taking place. Here is definitely a community.

The only explanation is that EFP and Boog put together the list.

We're working on the second part.

Bots are mostly on the forums, so yea, obviously most activity is there. But then, the forums here get more activity than most of those blogs put together and cover all of the topics aside from the non-wankery. But ya know.

The Escapist, CNN, and Dilbert...

Actually, f13 could still could be a blog - just one that's not very popular. :-)

Excuse me while I rant a sec here.

What the #*(#$ is a blog anyway? Back in the day, Tweety or Lum would use html to post an essay, or a commentary, put it on their website, and noone went around having delusions of grandeur about having a 'blog'. They actually had to bother knowing a bit of html. Nothing fancy, of course, but it essentially meant that you had to master some basics of teh web before you could spew forth your pearls of wisdom. A small speedbump, I know, but it probably kept quite a few idiots at bay.

Nowadays, anyone can set up a blog. In a way its worse than MySpace, because whereas myspace users are largely considered to be narcissistic in their motives, that stigma has yet to affect the bazillion bloggers out there who think that they're now worthy of people's particular attention.

Don't get me wrong, I think Lum and whoever else from days of yore who want to use a blog format to post what they had previously edited through html has that right. But for the rest of them, I wish it weren't that easy.

I've come to the conclusion that BLOG must mean Boorish Luddites Online Groping. For every decent 'blog' I run into, 12 of them leave me feel vaguely awash in the poster's ego and somehow molested.

I read somewhere that the average blog has one reader.

Blogs are just the new personal home page.

What makes this generation of web-stuff interesting is that it makes it easier to put out content and do the parts people are interested in without having to bother with the other parts. I you want to put a movie online you just make the movie and some host handles the rest. If you want to put your thoughts online you use some simple blogging software.

When people want to put some essays online they don't want to have to wade through HTML of tweak a bunch of shit themselves, set up their own forums, etc. Now they can concentrate on the part they like (writing useless shit nobody will read).

Less flexibility but more ease. Blogs are just a simpler, easier version of the personal home page you had in 97 that had pictures of your cats on it.

"I would never want to belong to a club that would have me as a member."

etc.

This I actually consider a fallacy of that table (and the chart at Raph's). When most of the conversation about MMO happen on forums, you need to include forums to get a true assessment of community. Blogs are just people standing on a box and talking to a wandering crowd. Some communities can come from there (Brokentoys, Raph's), but it's still generally one voice.

Forums are about many voices. And the constant seeking of clarity to find that middle ground (or not  :evil:). They are more akin to the games they talk about, for the messiness that is social interaction.

"Oh, my cat did this CUTE thing this morning, omg I just HAVE to share it all with you!"

....that's a blog.

I hate the word blog. It's your website, or an online journal. I never use the word blog seriously. My supervisor asked me if we should start a library blog and I picked up a length of pipe and gave him the evil eye, after which he kinda slunk out of the room, ashamed.

You're gunning for Employee of the Month, aren't you?

I wouldn't worry about it.  None of it.

I prefer to hit up a few fan oriented news sites each day, and then beyond that I like articles written by guilds that actually play a game. Its easy to find guilds that play on your server ,or similar type of server, that will write articles, quest logs, reports, etc.  So when I want opinion, I check places like this or other well run guild's homepages. I certainly don't waste time chasing down blogs.

1) I really like that new song by My Chemical Romance.  They understand me like my parents never will.  Nobody round here gets me because I am really unique...

or

2) Bush is a terrible liar and please read this article in the NYT (hat-tip to CrazyChick, who got it from Pamplemouse via Death to Fisk) about why we are living in a fascist state far worse than Germany, Soviet Russia or even Cambodia.

There. Now we're a blog.

I almost did a network graph of forum users, but that was more work than copy-n-pasting data from bloglines. Seemed too silly to put a lot of work into, to me.

In the "f13 is a community site" vs "f13 is a blog" debate, "f13 has a feed" is the winner.

And I take the whole thing waaaaay less seriously than many of you guys.

Next time I'm just going to post pictures of my cat.

Well, since I don't own a cat, just a cat.

Possibly a list of cats.

Top ten MMO cats.

You sound surprised we're (I) take this seriously :)

Once a list and a chart go up, the average not-seeking-deep-understanding folks (like, say, business decision makers) see "established fact". You threw yourself out there by putting together the list ;)

Heh, that's only cause the first prototype of Feedbot used the Nucleus RSS feed feature to get the article information. The current version just sucks things out of the database but I never bothered to turn off the feed.

WTF? It lists CNN.com and The New York Times home page as MMOG BLOGS?

I'm sorry, exsqueeze me? I cunt hear you through this ear infuction I have.

I realize they have some bloggy guys and that said bloggy guys might actually deign to discuss SWG, EQ or WoW every once in a while, but how in the fuck does that make them MMOG blogs? I've written more about MMOG's in 2006 than they have and I haven't written about MMOG's much at all this year. They haven't been worth the effort.

Oh wait, this was from one of the SWG devs, right? It's all become clear to me now. He's using an Oracle DB to score the blogs and each blog can only have one character per account. And there's no collision detection.

What a tool

It lists feeds that MMO blog readers on bloglines subscribe to (many of which are MMO blog feeds, and many of which are not).

Apart from the list itself, there were some words and such explaining this.

Feeds are good.

Websites without feeds are bad.

It should have been titled 'Top 100 Feeds MMOG Nerds Read'.

Hey at least we got our own little corner on Raphs map. I feel so special.

I fixed it.

Man, if we could just get listed in wikipedia we'd be famous!

My position was explained in real words by Darniaq instead of the grunts I made on my side of the monitor.

I envision Schild banging his fist and screaming "I AM NOT IN THE TOP 100?  THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!" as his monocle falls out.  But I can't see why anyone should take remotely seriously a list of "MMO blogs" that includes things that are clearly neither MMO-specific nor blogs at all.

We are indeed schild's blog, and all the posters are figments of his imagination and/or alternate personalities. Except me. I am a government bot. In fact, this post never happened.

I told you all a long time ago that I'm Schild's Tyler Durdenesque alter-ego.  He thinks he has narcolepsy, and everytime he wakes up in front of his PC there's suddenly a new post about how new games suck and UO is awesome and also Star Wars owns.

It's not "sleeping" it's "blacking out."

And it wasn't that f13 wasn't on there. it's why are things like Boing Boing on there. But that's been cleared up.

f13's feed is hard to find. Your related feeds would have been another vote for Boing Boing, though.

I think Escapist+CNN+Dilbert=MMO nerd is pretty amusing.

There's a feed?! I've seriously looked twice on the main page for the feed, like spending more then a few seconds trying to find it, and I have yet to find it.

(http://www.lietcam.com/images/cat/ArwenEowyn12-4-04.jpg)

Chaircats, help me find the feed!

IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT I AM ASSISTED!

Not long ago I discovered the beautiful descriptor "e/n blog".

(http://www.thenonentity.com/rssfeed.jpg)

It is a mystery!

http://www.f13.net/xml-rss2.php

But you didn't hear that from me.

You must have read that on my blog.  It's not really a blog, though, since it predates the word.  It's probably wholly uninteresting to anyone that doesn't enjoy ME as much as I enjoy myself.  Which is pretty much everyone.  Also: main page last updated twelve months ago, I think.  The interesting bits are on the subpages, anyway.

The F13 feed isn't something you just pick up and use like a garden hose.  It's more like a surreptitious IV that was placed into your vein while you slept.  If you find it, heads will roll.  Roll!

It sounds like a real blog.

Speaking of Blogs, I was Googling for work-at-home/online writing jobs for my gf.


I was shocked *SHOCKED* I tell's ya when I ran across a good number of classified ads by companies looking for people to set up and write Blog entries about product X or service X - and working in references to their company, who paid you a wage for writing that blog!  I'm not talking about 'ripoff' companies, but more-or-less legit, like chemical industry X, looking for people to do this.

<SarcasmOn>
What is the web coming to?

Your bookmark has strangely moved up two slots in my links folder.

Fancy that.

E/N predates the blog buzzword by half a decade. Hell, E/N was basically about what most blogging is about, just without the fancy Web2.0 guerrilla marketing buzzworded software.

Also, kitties!

I don't even know what a feed is.

There used to be a link on the front page but that got removed so now you have to figure out the super sekrit URL to get to it. Hint: it's just using the default Nucleus CMS RSS2 URL (there's an Atom one as well if you prefer that).

Edit: oops, that's what I get for not reading the next page but since Dundee let the cat out of the bag, there's an Atom feed at atom.php if you prefer that format.

I also don't understand this newfangled technology. I assume it'd annoy me though, by downloading shit top my computer that I'd never get around to reading as opposed to letting me go look at the bits I want of what I want when I want to.

Are digg, Slashdot and Metafilter really blogs? As well as providing links to things of interest to a community, don't blogs have to say something? If they don't, and its okay for blogs to just be connectors, isn't Technorati a better blog than any of these?

Blogs are basically a distributed comment system (P2P comments). To be a 'true' blog I'd argue that the site has to support track back functionality. That is what makes them different from your general geocities or centalized news/comment/forum system.

Trackbacks are just a (semi) automated way of sending spam, I mean, setting up a link between one site and another. You can do the same by manually typing in a link in a comment field.

There's lots of content on Slashdot and Metafilter, comment-wise.

Digg has something to say with regard to how links get rated, plus commentary on how stupid the submitter is and how the submitter is not either.

That said, the definition of blog is pretty fuzzy. We should go back to saying "website" or "homepage". They're all websites. My website is a homepage. Kinda real tired of blog already. If short for weblog, one imagines you have to be logging something, but in practice it's more of a place to delete spam.

Man, I am sick of the spam.

Also of my being prefixed to everything. First thing I have always done with a new computer since 1995 has been to rename "My Computer" to "PC" and "Network Neighborhood" to "Network" so I can pretend to be an adult. Now it's all MyEverything.

...Until OurStuff catches on.

What about "iComputer" and "iNetwork"? :-D

I hate the "My Computer" icon period (whether it's "mine" or not). Give me control panels and desktop mounted discs.

Liet's chaircats are cute, but I still nominate my chaircat for the list. She is quite enamored with Lord of the Rings when it comes on TV. She's also quite territorial, as you can see from her defense of one of our catassing chairs, so we can't have any more chaircats. We do have a neighbor cat who comes by twice a day to cadge some food, though.

(http://www.brokentoys.org/images/ellie.jpg)

I'm allergic to cats.

Which means cats love me.  :hello_kitty: :heart: :heartbreak:

Funny how that works. If you are allergic all the animals know it and swarm you. Don't come to my house if you are allergic to pets in general, as my 2 dogs and 2 cats will probably tackle you to the ground and lick your face.

I am allergic to your wife.  Can I come over?

She's not quite as feisty as the animals. You'd be disappointed.

... you have a geek cat. That's pretty awesome.

Now just teach her to play MMOs. I'm sure a catnip-scented keyboard could get her to do it.

ORLY?


I think whats missing is a debate on this thread about how the definition of "community" is changing....

I really think we should abandon the name blog, because it's too ugly.

Just as legitimate would be:  We'

Well, if it makes you feel any better, in Windows Vista, they dropped the whole 'My Blah' prefix on everything.

It's just Computer, Documents, Network. As it should be.

Wow.

That's the first feature of Vista anyone has ever described to me that has made me even slightly look forward to the upgrade. They should put that on the front of the packaging.

I am not joking.

I'm sure you're right.

Also, you can the glass interface bubbly and pink, and it comes with this weird cat dragon pink clock widget thing! WITH A BUBBLES SCREENSAVER!

I did all my Vista testing with that setup. Anyone who used that computer gave me weird looks when they looked over and saw the bubbles floating around the monitor.

Do you still press "Start" in order to shutdown?

People still do that?

I hit Ctrl+Alt+Del and click Shutdown.

Er... yes, you can still do that. I haven't used it in a while, but I don't believe it doesn't say 'Start', it's just a round green Windows button.

Seriously, that's a big improvement interface wise. Took them forever though.

What's with the start button hate? It's just a button.

I can't work when things are ugly.

It's just an example of poor interface design (and it doesn't end there).

Nothing wrong with the function of the start menu per se. There's just something wrong with the idea of pressing "Start" in order to log off or shutdown. That is something that boggles even the most ignorant of computer newbs, but for some reason, MS doesn't get it. They have tried so hard over the years to be like Macs, but they don't have the same underlying philosophy behind their decisions. Each successive interface is a jumbled mess, only with more bells and whistles.

I hit alt + f4, then u.

I pull the plug.  Sometimes I pour water on the keyboard.