RPG Bloggers and Blog Networks
Fall is a very busy time for me – I’m teaching, tutoring, freelancing, working and parenting. I’m also busy designing an iPhone App for Swords & Wizardry and Classic D&D which I’ll post more about very soon.
While I haven’t been posting as much content here on the Robertson Games blog I have been reading the excellent content people are sharing on their own RPG blogs. I used to use The RPG Bloggers Network as my starting point for finding new and interesting posts, but increasingly I found the blogs I was most interested in weren’t included in their list. There was also a tendency for blogs that update only once a week or so to get buried in the listing by blogs that post more often – sometimes multiple times a day. As an alternative I put together Strange Magic a simple blogger page that uses the expanded blogroll tool to let me quickly see what’s new and get a short snippet of text from each article.
I had thought that the missing blogs from RPGBN were a matter of those people either not knowing about the site or deciding they didn’t want to participate. Maybe they didn’t like the way RPGBN forces things into categories and excludes certain types of content. If I post about terrain I’m building for Battletech but don’t put it in the RPG category here it won’t show up on RPGBN for example, even though it would be of interest to people using minis in their RPGs.
The other day I saw a post from someone who was upset that they had been turned down for inclusion in the RPG Blogger network. That seemed a bit off, and the comments from the site owners reminded me a lot of the type of politics you see on RPG forums. That’s something I’m not really interested in (otherwise I’d be posting on a forum and not on blogs) and it got me thinking about what the actual advantages were to being part of the RPGBN and whether it outweighed the negatives. At this point I think it’s of much more benefit to the people running RPGBN (and their linked projects) for me to be a member than any benefit I receive from participating. I get much more traffic from Google searches and being in various other people’s blogrolls than I do from the Blogger Network site.
At the same time I still find the idea of a page where I can find out what people are posting without visiting each site to be a helpful idea. The Strange Magic page is my short list of blogs I read regularly, but there are lots of other blogs with great content I only stumble upon occasionally. To try and improve on that I’ve borrowed Jeff Rients (who shares a similar taste in games as me) extensive list of links from his blogroll and added them to a new blogspot page with expanded previews of the content from their most recent post. Already I’m finding interesting new RPG Blogs I’d been missing and checking out lots of new blogs.
Incidentally both Strange Magic and the new RPG Bloggers page are setup in a single narrow column because I’m usually checking out blogs in the evening with my iPhone and it saves me not having to zoom in each time I load the page.
Feel free to use either site if you find them handy, or setup your own to suit your personal taste. Both were very easy to do and took less time than writing this post. 
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Awesome, they work well on my BlackBerry too! Would you mind if I linked one or both on my own site?
I’ve been doing a lot of iPhone work lately. Good to hear it works well on the BlackBerry as well.
Yes, you can link to them if you want to.
“At this point I think it’s of much more benefit to the people running RPGBN (and their linked projects) for me to be a member than any benefit I receive from participating. I get much more traffic from Google searches and being in various other people’s blogrolls than I do from the Blogger Network site.”
I’d say I was sorry, but the truth is that that’s the goal: get bloggers some exposure, get people subscribing, get them recognized by other blogs, and let them grow on their own. So RPGBN may not have had anything to do with it, but the end result was the goal at least, so congrats!
I do have to take issue with the idea that the RPGBN is running for our benefit or our “linked projects” (I honestly don’t know what that is, other than our own blogs). The benefits are supposed to go to all members; you help them by sending your larger traffic to one central site.
Anyway, wanted to clear that up, and good luck with the new blogroll site.
I do have to take issue with the idea that the RPGBN is running for our benefit or our “linked projects” (I honestly don’t know what that is, other than our own blogs).
I don’t think you should “take issue” with that. It’s pretty straightforward — the people running any network hub usually do get more out of it than any of the individual participants.
By linked projects I meant: blogs, podcasts, freelance RPG writing etc. I mentioned my iPhone project earlier in the post, and I know some bloggers write about their print books or gaming accessories so I was thinking about different kinds of projects – not just the blog itself. But yes, I do believe there is greater benefit to the network admins than me with RPGBN. Nothing wrong with that though – it’s basically the blogroll for your site that you co-manage with a few other people.
“Both were very easy to do and took less time than writing this post.” Hehehehe.
I should compare your list with my own. I guess I could work on getting it to display better on my iPhone, but the truth is I hardly ever check it. Maybe I should… All these blogs are in my Feed Aggregator anyway.
I need to work on discovering new blogs. At the moment browsing the RPG Bloggers network every now and then, and following links on blog posts that appear in my Reader are how I discover them. Since I read almost all blogs inside my Reader, I never see Blogroll Sidebars.
Very cool. I’ll be linking on my site.
You’ve captured my thoughts on the issue pretty neatly.
Especially I found the blogs I was most interested in weren’t included in their list and the comments from the site owners reminded me a lot of the type of politics you see on RPG forums.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, in the marketplace of ideas
But thanks for setting up a, let us say less precise, list that captures more varied blogs.
Yah! Validation, rock!
I no longer get much traffic from the network compared to my overall traffic (roughly 2% of my traffic is from there now), but I still use the network page daily to read what the member blogs have been writing – it remains my primary portal to the RPG blogs out there.
I got to this post through the network page, for instance.
I have a few blogs that I follow that are not aggregated by the RPGBN, but typically I forget to follow up on them after a few weeks.
I created a crude Savage Bloggers Network feed and site myself.
Peoples general experience with the RPGBN is that initially it provides most of the traffic to a blog. But whilst absolute numbers stay the same, proportionally it declines overtime as the blog gets in the search engines and other people’s radars.
The RPGBN is a great way for new bloggers to reach an audience and a great way to find new blogs.
The question about what is valid on the RPGBN is vexed. Battletech terrain might be of interest to RPG gamers but the majority of gamers don’t use terrain. Letting something in because it might be of interest is a slippy slope.
My take is that anything specifically aimed at RPG gamers, such as article about how to use Battletech terrain in RPGs would be valid content.
Different people will get more or less out o a site like RPGBN depending on the audience they hope to attract, whether they want to build a community, provide reference and reourcea, run a business or dozens of other different things people might want out of an RPG website. I think the game system (and version) also factors into how much you get out of RPGBN both as a blogger and a reader.
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