Ecliptic Rift

So I haven’t done this here before, I don’t think, but I want to give up-and-coming bloggers (or perhaps those who’ve recently returned) a chance to get some publicity for their sites. In an effort to help those folks out, feel free to comment below on your EVE-related blog or site: give us a link and a little blurb about it. Don’t be rude about sites you don’t like and do NOT post about sites not related to EVE Online, because I will delete those posts.

Pimp your blog!

If you follow me on Twitter, you may know I had some RL health events over the previous few days. I did not have a heart attack or similar, as my wife and sister-in-law originally feared. I do have some health problems, though, and unfortunately typical ones: way out of shape, over-stressed, hypertension, that sort of thing. Without going into far too much detail, I need to get my life back in balance.

No, I don’t intend to leave EVE or blogging or anything like that. My problems here don’t center around gaming, really. But I do think I need to re-evaluate my specific plans for EVE Online: maybe continue to focus on low-intensity, non-aggressive play, staying away from the heavy pew stuff? Maybe avoid things that involve heavy time commitments? I don’t know yet, and I’d appreciate any advice from other players who’ve dealt with similar issues.

When I play RPGs, I always struggle with choice. So many options from which we can choose. Think about the career options in EVE, for example. You have pirates, nullsec warriors, explorers, miners, traders, researchers, builders, mission runners, militia, smugglers, diplomats, salvagers, haulers, and more. Each of those has specialties as well: fleet commanders, scouts, capital ship pilots, inventors, high-sec research starbase operators, station traders, and so forth.

In EVE, of course, those choices generally don’t mutually exclude each other. You don’t get locked into a “class” from which you’d have to respecialize and lose all your prior abilities A pilot who starts out mining can decide to start training combat skills, go pirate, and end up as the CEO of a nullsec corp that specializes in small-squadron warfare, and he could still go mine if (for some odd reason) he decided to do so. Some choices might not work simultaneously, of course, but over the course of your career trajectory, you can do anything.

I find myself at a crossroads right now. Primarily, of course, I am an EVE blogger — a freelance writer who just blathers on and on, writing about whatever strikes my fancy. But I also do a good bit of trading / exploration / hauling, sometimes with some research and manufacturing or even mission running in the mix. In the past, I have engaged in factional warfare, scouting and tackling for an anti-pirate alliance, a wee bit of piracy, salvaging, W-space living, running roleplay corporations, fiction writing, EVElopedia editing, and mining.

Lately, though, I’ve started to think I want to grow in another direction. I feel like I might have something to contribute towards PvP. It takes essentially no training time for a pilot to scout and tackle effectively, and not much more to provide effective electronic warfare support. I have a number of alts that could easily become mains, moving Casiella to a background character for fiction writing and semi-passive income via datacores, trading, and perhaps some science and industriy.

This doesn’t contract my thoughts on nonviolent play, I should note. I have a character dedicated to truly nonviolent play who will start to see more action next week, but he primarily exists for roleplay (in a solo corporation) and planetary management. Some press releases on the Intergalactic Summit, checking on my planetary production networks every four days or so, that sort of thing.

Yeah, so maybe I just can’t easily decide. I don’t know whether that’s wrong… see? I did it again!

New bloggers frequently ask how to get folks to read their blogs. Sometimes, even bloggers who have done this for a while wonder how to increase their readership. Not that you suddenly want thousands of daily visits to our EVE blogs, since we all do this for fun and not a second job. But you probably do want somebody to read it, because otherwise you wouldn’t bother, right?

So let’s talk about some basic ways to get folks to notice your blog. We won’t spend time on advanced techniques, nor on SEO, at least not this week. And I certainly do not ever intend to give tips on the “darker” side of driving traffic with so-called black hat techniques, since these often border on the fraudulent and illegal, defeating the purpose of building real community. But let’s see about some good stuff. (Be sure to comment with any techniques that have worked for you!)
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A few meta notes:

I played around a little bit today with Flavors.me. This site does one simple thing: allow you to centralize your various social media profiles and content in one place. For example, my EVE profile / flavor will show my Delicious links, tumblelog, and a few other things right there. Or you could check out my RL profile if so inclined. It has a few design options to let you easily change the layout, colors, background image, etc. This won’t change your life or anything but it might provide a handy sort of landing page, I think.

The blog redesign should come soon, with a much more minimalist approach: lots of white space, lighter colors, and less emphasis on widgets and gewgaws. I’ve sort of done a reversal on what I used to like in blog design: I never liked way-too-busy pages, but I used to think of a blog as a central hub for all my stuff. Now, each bit should do exactly what it does well, and nothing else. More to come there.

I started poking back into Star Wars Galaxies, but I refuse even to look at the space PVP there again. Yes, EVE has spoiled me, and no, I don’t intend to leave. I just have a lot of friends on the Starsider server I want to visit again for a bit. Also, SOE always provides a great refresher on why CCP is so awesome.

This post kicks off a new, weekly series here at Ecliptic Rift, Social Sunday, in which we’ll look at the best ways to use social media related to EVE Online. Feel free to jump in with your own comments, constructive criticism, suggestions, and questions.

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Most of us don’t write EVE blogs for fame and fortune. Okay, a few people might do it for fame, but certainly not fortune. Personally, I write this blog for two basic, interrelated reasons: I enjoy it, and I like talking with other EVE players with somewhat similar interests and outlooks. Not too similar, though, otherwise the conversations will get real boring, real fast. That means that comments matter just as much to blogs as good posts do. So today, I want to talk about encouraging commenting on your blog.

1. Make some decisions about who can comment. You could allow fully anonymous comments, or perhaps require commentators just to specify their name, URL, and maybe an email address. (Get ready for a good bit of moderation to avoid spam and whatnot.) Beyond that, you could require them to have an identity from another site like Google, Twitter, or OpenID. This latter system basically allows users to log into another site, like WordPress or Yahoo!, and use that ID elsewhere. This way, they can prove their identity without having yet another password to remember.
2. Don’t require only one specific sort of ID. This will just discourage comments. Some blogs only allow you to comment with your Google ID, for example, and for those of us whose EVE identity doesn’t reside in the Googleverse, we frequently just won’t comment even if we’d like to do so. You should allow multiple forms of authentication, which with both allow visitors to comment easily as well as reduce spam and sock puppets.
3. I seriously recommend using some form of commenting system, like Disqus or IntenseDebate. Both work well, integrate with multiple blog platforms, and only have fairly minor differences between them. Whichever you choose will do the job pretty well. This sort of system will allow your commentators to retain ownership of their words. They can have a record of what they write on different sites and can easily keep up with ongoing conversations, rather than comment and disappear. They can also choose to publicize their comments (e.g. via Twitter), which will encourage more people to come check out the conversation.

   A side benefit: since switching to a system, I’ve stopped receiving any comment spam whatsoever. I just don’t see it appear at all. Even if I didn’t get any other benefit, that alone would make the whole thing worthwhile. Allowing comment spam not only discourages readers, it will end up causing your site to get dropped from search engines. And you could end up allowing all sorts of malware, including keyloggers and other account stealing programs, to use your blog to attack fellow players — or yourself.

4. Allow users to choose to receive future replies to the same post via email. Even if you don’t use this sort of system, you want to encourage your visitors to come back and continue to participate in the conversation. Otherwise, they’ll come and say something, then someone else will respond and the first commentator will never know. Some people won’t want to use the option, but many will.
5. When folks do comment, reply to them. Engage in conversation with them, and sound like yourself. After all, they took the time to come tell you what they think, so be friendly and polite. Personally, I find this one of the most rewarding and enjoyable parts of blogging.

What other suggestions do you have to encourage commenting?

Like most of you, probably, I’ve spent some time over the last few days poring over the EVE Gate test server. I like what I’ve seen thus far, but until we get a little further into the test, reviewing it in any more detail doesn’t seem quite fair to me.

In the meantime, I’ve created a Facebook profile for Casiella. I did so in a semi-IC fashion: while she knows nothing of DUST 514, for example, her political and religious views reflect those of the character, not necessarily the player. So far, I’ve joined the Eve Online Bloggers group and signed up as a fan of several related pages. Any other suggestions I should take under advisement? (Please don’t suggest your own blog’s fan page, as I can find those just fine.)

Also, if you play EVE, feel free to send me a friend request. I don’t use that Facebook account for anything but EVE Online and related stuff, though, so don’t expect updates about my family and work and whatnot.

Would it bother anybody if I merged together my feed from this blog and from my EVE tumblelog? Just a thought, since I tend to throw smaller bits over there, particularly if I have little or no additional commentary. The actual content would stay all EVE-related, though! (I’d make the feed URLs redirect appropriately, so my readers shouldn’t have to do anything yourselves.)

I’d appreciate any feedback (positive, negative, neutral, orthogonal) you might have.

Roc Wieler posted a fairly thoughtful response to CrazyKinux’s desire to revamp his Blog Pack. Some of that response had to do with the feed in Capsuleer, the iPhone application Roc helps develop, possibly including less reading material. As far as that specific concern goes, I think that the Capsuleer devs need to consider their own data sources. Whether they want to continue depending on one data source really goes to the heart of what that part of their app does, and as I don’t use it, I don’t have much of an opinion there. The team there can undoubtedly decide for themselves how they’d like to proceed.

But then CrazyKinux responded that he would personally choose the blogs and increase the count to 50. At least one other blogger put together a great response, with which I agree for the most part.

Oddly, some folks got even more upset. I can’t speak for them, but to represent their views fairly, I think I can say that they feel that the blog pack should be determined by a larger group of people based on varying criteria. They feel a sense of community ownership in the listing, and CrazyKinux should feel pride that his efforts have created that sense of ownership.

I’m not CrazyKinux so I don’t have to feel that. Instead, I’ll speak bluntly.

Have you lost your ever-lovin’ mind?!

I’m not kidding. CK does a lot of work trying to filter through the huge number of EVE blogs out there to assemble his blog pack. Personally, I don’t know that I agree with every assessment he makes, but he does a good job overall. Some folks make the leap from there to assume that everyone thinks that these blogs represent the “best” in some universal way, as if that could even happen.

Some time ago, we had the EVE Fiction Blog Pack. I’ve seen lists of pirate blogs, too. If you think we should have additional sub-communities, great. Go create it. Self-organizing, ad hoc communities can really survive and even thrive, so show us what you can do. Or don’t create one: personally, I’ve opted to list every active EVE blog I can find in my own blogroll without highlighting the “best”. I’ve considered doing themed listings, too: exploration, industrial, fiction, etc., because of my own interests. Personally, I’d like to see CK put together a list of the blogs he thinks represent the best of what the EVE community has to offer, but I’d also like to see you (and you and you and you, too) put together a similar list. Not by voting someplace, as if that can be quantified, but so I can say, ‘hmm, I like blogger X’s stuff, I should read the blogs he likes because I’ll probably like them too.’

But you know what really gets me madder than a sack of hornets? When a sense of ownership turns into a sense of entitlement. “The list is popular and therefore we should get to decide what’s in it, because otherwise I will be sad and left out and the community will die.” As much as I appreciate CK’s hard work, the EVE community won’t die based on what one single person does or doesn’t do. We’ve grown past that. I’ll keep writing what I write (and so will many of you) because of the people that read it, not because I want some badge of approval from one single person.

Just please stop going all emo on us. Nobody likes emo. And if you think I mean you, then I probably do. So pull up your big-boy underwear and help with whatever crowd-sourced ad hoc folksonomy flash mob <insert more buzzwords here> you want with your own project. Or tell CrazyKinux what you’d like to see in his list. Or just enjoy what other folks do, because after all, that’s why they do it.

I looked over my referrer[1] stats this morning and noticed something interesting. As you might expect, the sources for my traffic don’t have a uniform distribution. Some sites send more traffic than others. But, even more interesting, they have a fairly classic power law distribution. For example, I threw together this chart of my January 2010 referrer stats[2]:

Or see the actual table:

referrer	count
Google Reader	229
crazykinux.com	169
lifeinlowsec.blogspot.com	159
ninveah.com	135
eve-wormholes.blogspot.com	127
twitter.com	127
evebloggers.com	107
EVE Online Forum	57
iGoogle	41
minuitsoleil.blogspot.com	33
rifterdrifter.com	26
eclipticrift.wordpress.com	25
myrhial.blogspot.com	24
danteedmundo.blogspot.com	18
nashhkadavreveblog.blogspot.com	18
evenewb.blogspot.com	18
Massively.com	16
johnamenta.blogspot.com	15
eve-druid.com	14
nosygamer.blogspot.com	14
podlogs.com/findersandkeepers	14
twitter.com/00sage00/tweetfleet	12
My Yahoo!	12
WordPress Dashboard	11
evetimecode.com	10
google.fr	10
00sage00.wordpress.com	10
Gamer Blips	9

So, lots of love to CrazyKinux, Mynxee, Kirith Kodachi (one of my ‘blog idols’), and Star Defender!

[1]: Yes, I know the official spelling is “referer”. But the official spelling is wrong, so let’s not go there, okay?
[2]: Stats for different referrer URLs from the same site have been combined. For example, if I got traffic from a blog’s home page and several separate posts, I combined them for this analysis.