The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
These 1up blogs seem to not have RSS, and they stick your desktop wallpaper above your content.
Uh..
Yeah.
I warned you. The blog software itself is rather sucky. However, I can't think of any other gaming site, with a large community, that offers blogging capabilities. I'd love to be proven wrong however ...
I've started a blog today actually (it's in my sig).
I was told by Julian Dibbell of Terra Nova fame that to get a headstart in thinking with clever people, I need to get publishing (which means blogging). And hopefully, blogging will result in people noticing me.
So, tell me what you think of my first posts. What you like, what you don't, where it should go and shouldn't.
I'm interested in all opinions.
The first post explains what I think the blog is trying to communicate.
The blog I write for is actually in my signature. It's a laid back approach to web news. Basically write about whatever is cool - music, movies, videogames. Uncensored, and un-biased.
Basically it's a good 2 minute time waster if you have nothing else to check out on the net.
Ok, let's say I wanted to start a blog, and I've been thinking about it a lot recently. Sort of an online alternative to a journal. Let's say that I'd want to write about things that no one but myself would care about. Let's say I've been drinking tonight.
Where would I go to start? How would it work? Who are you people and how did I get here?
Ok, let's say I wanted to start a blog, and I've been thinking about it a lot recently. Sort of an online alternative to a journal. Let's say that I'd want to write about things that no one but myself would care about. Let's say I've been drinking tonight.
Where would I go to start? How would it work? Who are you people and how did I get here?
Ok, let's say I wanted to start a blog, and I've been thinking about it a lot recently. Sort of an online alternative to a journal. Let's say that I'd want to write about things that no one but myself would care about. Let's say I've been drinking tonight.
Where would I go to start? How would it work? Who are you people and how did I get here?
Ok, let's say I wanted to start a blog, and I've been thinking about it a lot recently. Sort of an online alternative to a journal. Let's say that I'd want to write about things that no one but myself would care about. Let's say I've been drinking tonight.
Where would I go to start? How would it work? Who are you people and how did I get here?
Ok, let's say I wanted to start a blog, and I've been thinking about it a lot recently. Sort of an online alternative to a journal. Let's say that I'd want to write about things that no one but myself would care about. Let's say I've been drinking tonight.
Where would I go to start? How would it work? Who are you people and how did I get here?
Vox is good. Not very customizable but their default layout choices are pretty slick. It's by the people who did LJ so there's some improvements. Very "Web 2.0" feeling. No pay option yet so it's ad supported only.
It's a video games bargain blog, UK based so no use to any yanks, and it's quite successful.
I am getting about 200/300 unique hits a day, and earning on average £2 a day from it. It's in my sig if you're interested
I'm curious about this. I'm toying with the idea of blogging about an ongoing product that's hitting the market soonish, and I'm personally sick of having to trawl through a number of websites for information and I'm assuming that others are in the same boat as myself. I figure if I do this right, I should be at least able to pay hosting bills via Google ads and whatnot.
What's been your experience, and how'd you set things up regarding income? I'm assuming most of your income comes from referrals to places like Amazon, etc rather than Google ads?
The site I write for (see sig) runs on Word Press and I'm very much down with it. Basically it's gaming news (updated pretty damn regularly), and once or twice a week my thoughts on whatever's going on in the gaming industry. I enjoy doing it, gaming journalism is something I'd consider going into as a career.
(If you do end up checking Think Theory out, yeah I know there's some bugs to be worked out, it's still young and being worked on.)
And if anyone wants to link to eachother or something shoot me a PM.
The site I write for (see sig) runs on Word Press and I'm very much down with it. Basically it's gaming news (updated pretty damn regularly), and once or twice a week my thoughts on whatever's going on in the gaming industry. I enjoy doing it, gaming journalism is something I'd consider going into as a career.
See, I was thinking of doing something like that, but I figure with a fulltime job there's no way to get that updated enough. I tried to talk a friend of mine in the US into basically being the other side of the clock for me, but that didn't pan out.
One thing that I find somewhat lacking in a lot of blogs is actual commentary. My ideal news source would be a place which covers as much news as possible (like Fark), has a link to the original news item but also has one or two comments by actual editors that put the news in context. Otherwise it just becomes links spam.
It's a video games bargain blog, UK based so no use to any yanks, and it's quite successful.
I am getting about 200/300 unique hits a day, and earning on average £2 a day from it. It's in my sig if you're interested
I'm curious about this. I'm toying with the idea of blogging about an ongoing product that's hitting the market soonish, and I'm personally sick of having to trawl through a number of websites for information and I'm assuming that others are in the same boat as myself. I figure if I do this right, I should be at least able to pay hosting bills via Google ads and whatnot.
What's been your experience, and how'd you set things up regarding income? I'm assuming most of your income comes from referrals to places like Amazon, etc rather than Google ads?
That's pretty much it. Google Ads is some revenue, but really not much.
A quick look at my "All time" data from google ads reveals -
5,232 visits to my blog
24 clicks on google Ads
US$6.04 total revenue
So I've really only got the ads because it's minimal hassle, and the amount of cash I get from it will increase with traffic.
Most of my cash, as you said, comes from affiliate links, on Amazon and tons of other retailers. Funnily enough, allot of the time I get money off Amazon from people click on a link for a product, not buying it, but browsing to a different item and then buying that. only about half the stuff I have commission for on Amazon is stuff I have linked.
As I said, I am getting about £2 a day, but it varies allot, like I got £22 in one day last week, because someone bought a 360 + 2 games via me, but some days I get like £0.14 total.
My goal with this blog is partly to make a little pocket money doing something I enjoy, but mostly I have a vision for something in the future, and this is a step on the way to it.
The site I write for (see sig) runs on Word Press and I'm very much down with it. Basically it's gaming news (updated pretty damn regularly), and once or twice a week my thoughts on whatever's going on in the gaming industry. I enjoy doing it, gaming journalism is something I'd consider going into as a career.
See, I was thinking of doing something like that, but I figure with a fulltime job there's no way to get that updated enough. I tried to talk a friend of mine in the US into basically being the other side of the clock for me, but that didn't pan out.
I do the news when I'm online foruming and checking news anyway. I do that a couple/few times per day though, I guess potentially more than you. It's not a big time sink though, type up a paragraph or two with a couple links and you're done. As for the articles, it takes me maybe an hour once or twice per week, something you could probably fit in somewhere in your schedule if you were really interested.
One thing that I find somewhat lacking in a lot of blogs is actual commentary. My ideal news source would be a place which covers as much news as possible (like Fark), has a link to the original news item but also has one or two comments by actual editors that put the news in context. Otherwise it just becomes links spam
That's kind of what Think Theory is. The news pieces don't have much (or any I guess) opinion in them, but my articles are often just what I think of the latest gaming announcements, trailers, news, etc.
I do the news when I'm online foruming and checking news anyway. I do that a couple/few times per day though, I guess potentially more than you. It's not a big time sink though, type up a paragraph or two with a couple links and you're done. As for the articles, it takes me maybe an hour once or twice per week, something you could probably fit in somewhere in your schedule if you were really interested.
Oh, I check a bit in the morning, during my lunchbreak and over the course of the time I spend at home in between other activities. It isn't so much of fulfilling the potential of what one (fulltime working) person can do, it's more that regardless of how much time you spend as a single person, the time you spend sleeping or the blocks of time spent earning money will be untapped resources. I know if I saw a site like the one I envision, I'd want it up to date within 30 minutes of a story hitting the web kind of thing. One person can't physically do it, which is why I was looking into help from a friend in the US.
That's kind of what Think Theory is. The news pieces don't have much (or any I guess) opinion in them, but my articles are often just what I think of the latest gaming announcements, trailers, news, etc.
I find that I can make a lot more sense out of news once I have a few opinions to put it into context with. And if you have 'editors' who have seen all the news about a particular topic and have commented on it, it means that if you missed that tiny titbit about the latest Halo 3 screen capture, you won't miss the significance of the latest Frankie posting on the Bungie forums, etc.
Editor one: "When put in the context of this, maybe it looks like Halo 3 will have x feature? That would be awesome, as x feature is something gamers have been requesting for ages."
Editor two: "But, if you take into account y, z might be the more logical choice. Which I personally wouldn't like because of abcd."
I think the weekly editorials are a good idea, I had laid out plans to do those based on current news and topics, with perhaps a monthly additional editorial which would focus on some sort of long-term gaming topic such as digital distribution, future of consoles, etc.
I'll have a read of Think Theory, you've got my curiosity perked as to how closely your idea in execution resembles mine.
Am I missing something, or is there no way of doing a Trackback with Vox? It seems crazy, as Vox is a SixApart site...
Lewisham on
0
VariableMouth CongressStroke Me Lady FameRegistered Userregular
edited May 2007
I had a comedy blog a few months back, but I got lazy so I cancelled the website. I'm thinking of starting it up again... it's one of few topics that I haven't seen a site/blog dedicated to. not that they aren't out there, I just haven't seen them.
it's summer now, maybe I will get back to it.
edit - people with sites... who do you use for hosting?
I had a blog but it ended up hardly writing anything for it. Something like once a month or two.
I just restarted a blog early this month at http://www.shifting-bits.com and I'm trying to write regularly. I'm aiming for around twice a week. Although, it's still a bit hard to find time to write stuff.
I don't really want a blog on "how my day was" so it was supposed to be a technology/games blog. Since bigger blogs like Kotaku is much better with news I'm thinking of writing opinion/editorial pieces rather than reporting news.
Of course, I haven't really written anything of note/game-related as of yet. Most of the stuff I've written is about me fixing the blog's design and tweaking (and sometimes breaking) wordpress.
edit - people with sites... who do you use for hosting?
I use nearlyfreespeech.net. Pretty cheap since you only pay for the bandwidth and storage you use. Although they don't have CPanel and you'll probably end up using the command-line.
I started a blog in 2001 using Blogger and wrote for a couple years. It was mostly creative non-fiction and experimental nonsense—something to keep me writing and dabbling in web design.
I don't think there's anything wrong with people writing mundane nonsense on their blogs. It's not like teh internets is running out of room, and most of those type of blogs exist on social network type sites like Blogger or Live Journal and are easily ignored. I will say this: Don't write anything damning. The internet is a crazy thing. Even though my first blog is long defunct, remnants exist on archive sites.
Afterwards I used MovableType for awhile. MT is good, but not very user-friendly. Updates can be a bear.
Currently I'm doing less of a "blog" and more of a collection of articles. I'm more interested in quality than quantity. At least that's the plan—I've only got as far as the design. Eventually I'll write some articles. I got fed up with MT and am using Textpattern now. I'm happy with it so far.
Am I missing something, or is there no way of doing a Trackback with Vox? It seems crazy, as Vox is a SixApart site...
Not sure but LJ didn't have trackback before either. Trackback is used in a lot of spamming so maybe they don't have it on purpose. I just use http://kalsey.com/tools/trackback/ to do manual trackbacks when it matters (mainly when I talk about stuff on ZUN's blog)
This is of more importance than my rather poor 6 visits a day (according to my statcounter).
Someone link their blog to mine, and I'll link to yours
Does anyone have any comments about my blog? I've been writing regularly, I'd like to hear what people think of it. I am pretty desperate for more traffic (my whole self-worth is now caught up in this blog) so hearing any feedback whatsoever would be awesome.
This is of more importance than my rather poor 6 visits a day (according to my statcounter).
Someone link their blog to mine, and I'll link to yours
Does anyone have any comments about my blog? I've been writing regularly, I'd like to hear what people think of it. I am pretty desperate for more traffic (my whole self-worth is now caught up in this blog) so hearing any feedback whatsoever would be awesome.
A few days ago I put a link to your blog on my site.
I have had a few rather hilarious things happen to me in my life, and my friends always get me to tell them stories when we are out drinking. Then, one of my mates told me to write a book, and I thought, pfft, too much effort.
Then I had the idea of making a blog, and posting all my stories into it. Then if I ever DO get round to writing a book, all the stories are already written. Its only a shabby myspace blog, but it gets a fair few hits.
What I'm really interested in is finding out if people like yourselves (intelligent people who don't know me personally) find my blog as funny as my friends do. Cuase I tihnk they find it amusing simply because they know me etc etc
This is of more importance than my rather poor 6 visits a day (according to my statcounter).
Someone link their blog to mine, and I'll link to yours
Does anyone have any comments about my blog? I've been writing regularly, I'd like to hear what people think of it. I am pretty desperate for more traffic (my whole self-worth is now caught up in this blog) so hearing any feedback whatsoever would be awesome.
A few days ago I put a link to your blog on my site.
Yes, I noticed that, you're a star I wish Vox had blogrolls!
I wish Vox had a lot of things to be honest. I bought a domain name (http://www.syntheticist.com is mine!) which was a pain in the ass, as pretty much every variation of Synthetic is taken. Now that I've done that, I want to map the domain, but Vox won't let me. So I thought about Typepad, and tried it, then saw it can't do things that Vox does, like it's rich post editor. Or it's better themes (albeit less customisable).
So I'm sticking to Vox, as it makes my posts look nice. If/when they get Typepad to a level where it is actually a paid Vox, rather than some under-developed step-sister, I'll move over.
This is of more importance than my rather poor 6 visits a day (according to my statcounter).
Someone link their blog to mine, and I'll link to yours
Does anyone have any comments about my blog? I've been writing regularly, I'd like to hear what people think of it. I am pretty desperate for more traffic (my whole self-worth is now caught up in this blog) so hearing any feedback whatsoever would be awesome.
A few days ago I put a link to your blog on my site.
Yes, I noticed that, you're a star I wish Vox had blogrolls!
I wish Vox had a lot of things to be honest. I bought a domain name (http://www.syntheticist.com is mine!) which was a pain in the ass, as pretty much every variation of Synthetic is taken. Now that I've done that, I want to map the domain, but Vox won't let me. So I thought about Typepad, and tried it, then saw it can't do things that Vox does, like it's rich post editor. Or it's better themes (albeit less customisable).
So I'm sticking to Vox, as it makes my posts look nice. If/when they get Typepad to a level where it is actually a paid Vox, rather than some under-developed step-sister, I'll move over.
Yeah, I tried Wordpress, but I didn't like it at all. The things I take for granted (like photo-uploading and resizing in a sane way) from Vox it simply doesn't do.
I also like the Vox community feel to it. It's just frustrating that they haven't realised the best way to monetize their business is to charge for some specific features like domain mapping (which wordpress.com do)
Posts
Edit: also, Movable Type for lyfe, yo.
Steam BoardGameGeek Twitter
I kind of abandoned it entirely. You can use Blogger from your mobile phone now, though Google Mobile, which is kind of neat.
It's called Microsoft Word.
Any color you want.
Why does this sound like a weird kind of drug deal?
Heh.
SE++ Map Steam
Uh..
Yeah.
猿も木から落ちる
I warned you. The blog software itself is rather sucky. However, I can't think of any other gaming site, with a large community, that offers blogging capabilities. I'd love to be proven wrong however ...
- Don't add me, I'm at/near the friend limit
Steam: JC_Rooks
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JiunweiC
I work on this: http://www.xbox.com
2009 is a year of Updates - one every Monday. Hopefully. xx
I was told by Julian Dibbell of Terra Nova fame that to get a headstart in thinking with clever people, I need to get publishing (which means blogging). And hopefully, blogging will result in people noticing me.
So, tell me what you think of my first posts. What you like, what you don't, where it should go and shouldn't.
I'm interested in all opinions.
The first post explains what I think the blog is trying to communicate.
Basically it's a good 2 minute time waster if you have nothing else to check out on the net.
www.internetpopular.com
It's a video games bargain blog, UK based so no use to any yanks, and it's quite successful.
I am getting about 200/300 unique hits a day, and earning on average £2 a day from it. It's in my sig if you're interested
www.wingnightcouncil.com
Where would I go to start? How would it work? Who are you people and how did I get here?
But is where the trendy bloggers blog?
Oh hey I can log in with my Gmail, that's pretty cool.
And having the "Send to Blogger" in your google toolbar is kinda cool
Alright I have a blog now. It has a terrible title. Maybe I should start this tomorrow when I'm sober.
...Nah.
Switch: US 1651-2551-4335 JP 6310-4664-2624
MH3U Monster Cheat Sheet / MH3U Veggie Elder Ticket Guide
I don't like the interface on your own blog when you are logged in, it's very messy.
Also, for Firefox users, there's a greasemonkey script that removes the ads from Vox (only for people who use the script)
Switch: US 1651-2551-4335 JP 6310-4664-2624
MH3U Monster Cheat Sheet / MH3U Veggie Elder Ticket Guide
I'm curious about this. I'm toying with the idea of blogging about an ongoing product that's hitting the market soonish, and I'm personally sick of having to trawl through a number of websites for information and I'm assuming that others are in the same boat as myself. I figure if I do this right, I should be at least able to pay hosting bills via Google ads and whatnot.
What's been your experience, and how'd you set things up regarding income? I'm assuming most of your income comes from referrals to places like Amazon, etc rather than Google ads?
(If you do end up checking Think Theory out, yeah I know there's some bugs to be worked out, it's still young and being worked on.)
And if anyone wants to link to eachother or something shoot me a PM.
See, I was thinking of doing something like that, but I figure with a fulltime job there's no way to get that updated enough. I tried to talk a friend of mine in the US into basically being the other side of the clock for me, but that didn't pan out.
One thing that I find somewhat lacking in a lot of blogs is actual commentary. My ideal news source would be a place which covers as much news as possible (like Fark), has a link to the original news item but also has one or two comments by actual editors that put the news in context. Otherwise it just becomes links spam.
That's pretty much it. Google Ads is some revenue, but really not much.
A quick look at my "All time" data from google ads reveals -
5,232 visits to my blog
24 clicks on google Ads
US$6.04 total revenue
So I've really only got the ads because it's minimal hassle, and the amount of cash I get from it will increase with traffic.
Most of my cash, as you said, comes from affiliate links, on Amazon and tons of other retailers. Funnily enough, allot of the time I get money off Amazon from people click on a link for a product, not buying it, but browsing to a different item and then buying that. only about half the stuff I have commission for on Amazon is stuff I have linked.
As I said, I am getting about £2 a day, but it varies allot, like I got £22 in one day last week, because someone bought a 360 + 2 games via me, but some days I get like £0.14 total.
My goal with this blog is partly to make a little pocket money doing something I enjoy, but mostly I have a vision for something in the future, and this is a step on the way to it.
I do the news when I'm online foruming and checking news anyway. I do that a couple/few times per day though, I guess potentially more than you. It's not a big time sink though, type up a paragraph or two with a couple links and you're done. As for the articles, it takes me maybe an hour once or twice per week, something you could probably fit in somewhere in your schedule if you were really interested.
That's kind of what Think Theory is. The news pieces don't have much (or any I guess) opinion in them, but my articles are often just what I think of the latest gaming announcements, trailers, news, etc.
Oh, I check a bit in the morning, during my lunchbreak and over the course of the time I spend at home in between other activities. It isn't so much of fulfilling the potential of what one (fulltime working) person can do, it's more that regardless of how much time you spend as a single person, the time you spend sleeping or the blocks of time spent earning money will be untapped resources. I know if I saw a site like the one I envision, I'd want it up to date within 30 minutes of a story hitting the web kind of thing. One person can't physically do it, which is why I was looking into help from a friend in the US.
I find that I can make a lot more sense out of news once I have a few opinions to put it into context with. And if you have 'editors' who have seen all the news about a particular topic and have commented on it, it means that if you missed that tiny titbit about the latest Halo 3 screen capture, you won't miss the significance of the latest Frankie posting on the Bungie forums, etc.
Editor one: "When put in the context of this, maybe it looks like Halo 3 will have x feature? That would be awesome, as x feature is something gamers have been requesting for ages."
Editor two: "But, if you take into account y, z might be the more logical choice. Which I personally wouldn't like because of abcd."
I think the weekly editorials are a good idea, I had laid out plans to do those based on current news and topics, with perhaps a monthly additional editorial which would focus on some sort of long-term gaming topic such as digital distribution, future of consoles, etc.
I'll have a read of Think Theory, you've got my curiosity perked as to how closely your idea in execution resembles mine.
it's summer now, maybe I will get back to it.
edit - people with sites... who do you use for hosting?
I just restarted a blog early this month at http://www.shifting-bits.com and I'm trying to write regularly. I'm aiming for around twice a week. Although, it's still a bit hard to find time to write stuff.
I don't really want a blog on "how my day was" so it was supposed to be a technology/games blog. Since bigger blogs like Kotaku is much better with news I'm thinking of writing opinion/editorial pieces rather than reporting news.
Of course, I haven't really written anything of note/game-related as of yet. Most of the stuff I've written is about me fixing the blog's design and tweaking (and sometimes breaking) wordpress.
I use nearlyfreespeech.net. Pretty cheap since you only pay for the bandwidth and storage you use. Although they don't have CPanel and you'll probably end up using the command-line.
I don't think there's anything wrong with people writing mundane nonsense on their blogs. It's not like teh internets is running out of room, and most of those type of blogs exist on social network type sites like Blogger or Live Journal and are easily ignored. I will say this: Don't write anything damning. The internet is a crazy thing. Even though my first blog is long defunct, remnants exist on archive sites.
Afterwards I used MovableType for awhile. MT is good, but not very user-friendly. Updates can be a bear.
Currently I'm doing less of a "blog" and more of a collection of articles. I'm more interested in quality than quantity. At least that's the plan—I've only got as far as the design. Eventually I'll write some articles. I got fed up with MT and am using Textpattern now. I'm happy with it so far.
Not sure but LJ didn't have trackback before either. Trackback is used in a lot of spamming so maybe they don't have it on purpose. I just use http://kalsey.com/tools/trackback/ to do manual trackbacks when it matters (mainly when I talk about stuff on ZUN's blog)
Switch: US 1651-2551-4335 JP 6310-4664-2624
MH3U Monster Cheat Sheet / MH3U Veggie Elder Ticket Guide
This is of more importance than my rather poor 6 visits a day (according to my statcounter).
Someone link their blog to mine, and I'll link to yours
Does anyone have any comments about my blog? I've been writing regularly, I'd like to hear what people think of it. I am pretty desperate for more traffic (my whole self-worth is now caught up in this blog) so hearing any feedback whatsoever would be awesome.
A few days ago I put a link to your blog on my site.
Then I had the idea of making a blog, and posting all my stories into it. Then if I ever DO get round to writing a book, all the stories are already written. Its only a shabby myspace blog, but it gets a fair few hits.
What I'm really interested in is finding out if people like yourselves (intelligent people who don't know me personally) find my blog as funny as my friends do. Cuase I tihnk they find it amusing simply because they know me etc etc
http://blog.myspace.com/mypaunch
Please tell me if you bother to read it and found it vaguely amusing.
I'm actually really enjoying reading everyones blogs.. great stuff!
Yes, I noticed that, you're a star
I wish Vox had a lot of things to be honest. I bought a domain name (http://www.syntheticist.com is mine!) which was a pain in the ass, as pretty much every variation of Synthetic is taken. Now that I've done that, I want to map the domain, but Vox won't let me. So I thought about Typepad, and tried it, then saw it can't do things that Vox does, like it's rich post editor. Or it's better themes (albeit less customisable).
So I'm sticking to Vox, as it makes my posts look nice. If/when they get Typepad to a level where it is actually a paid Vox, rather than some under-developed step-sister, I'll move over.
Why dpn't ypu give Wordpress a shot?
I also like the Vox community feel to it. It's just frustrating that they haven't realised the best way to monetize their business is to charge for some specific features like domain mapping (which wordpress.com do)
Just a note for PA bloggers on Vox to hit up the new Penny Arcadians group, for fun and traffic!
http://pennyarcade.groups.vox.com/