Author Topic: Rolemaster blogs  (Read 11381 times)

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Offline Thom @ ICE

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #20 on: November 03, 2014, 09:52:35 AM »
Hand in hand with that, if people wish to have blogs off-site to maintain clear independence from ICE that is great also - feel free to highlight them to us and we'll help promote them for you here in the forums and in our social media efforts.
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Offline Peter R

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #21 on: November 03, 2014, 11:06:04 AM »
I personally would agree with you.

Blogs are different beasts to forums though. With a blog it is all about getting an insight to the mind or world of the blogger. At the same time through the comments system the blog gives the reader access to the writer. The audience comment on the content, give feedback and interact with the writer and the content. The blog is also a continuum whereas a forum is discrete topics.

Finally the person who started this topic was looking for other blogs or sites to use in addition to these forums.
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Offline Inez Hull

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #22 on: November 03, 2014, 08:50:16 PM »
The forums are a great way of workshopping ideas. However I don't think they are so great for presenting longer or finished off work. A blog is a good format for reading a single piece of work and digesting if on its merits, whereas when reading ideas on a messageboard I think folks start formulating their own ideas and response before they have even go shed reading!

Offline Cory Magel

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #23 on: November 03, 2014, 11:26:53 PM »
Are the things you're thinking of possibly appropriate for publication on the Guild Companion?
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(Channeling Companion, RMQ 1 & 2, and various Guild Companion articles author).

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Offline Inez Hull

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #24 on: November 04, 2014, 01:59:48 AM »
If I can find the time to put into them at least one probably is

Offline Peter R

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #25 on: November 04, 2014, 02:05:41 AM »
Or turn that around, would the guild companion be better presented as a blog?

That idea has a certain amount of merit at first glance. I haven't thought this through overly but...

  • using services such as networkedblogs every update to the guild companion could be automatically shared to ICEs facebook and other soial media platforms
  • the discussions on these forums about each issue would become the comments under each article or column. This would show new arrivales at the companion from search engines that the companion was a live and vibrant publication
  • the guild companion is a standalone data silo whereas bloggers are part of a large and active community and guest blogging is desirble and commonplace. The guild companion could actively welcome contributions from other industry figures and the blog is the natural 21st century media for such publications
  • services such as pubsubhubub are easily integrated into blogs and instantly tell the search engines when a new article is published. This improves google rankings (they call it the freshness bonus) which could then in turn bring new gamers into rolemaster.

Moving from site to blog is relatively easy as only new content would be required to be in the blog format so there is no cnversion required. You would be moving some activity from here to the blog but the guild companion discussions do not even seem to be mainstream even on here. They rarely if ever reach two or three pages of discussion.

Forums are good, blogs can be good, standalone static sites are not so good these days.
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Offline Inez Hull

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #26 on: November 05, 2014, 04:58:21 AM »
Yeah you could be onto something. The whole monthly newsletter thing tends to keep traffic away except for when there's an expected update

Offline Jaeru

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #27 on: November 05, 2014, 09:16:37 AM »
Making the Guild Companion a blog is certainly a good idea. Give the host of templates currently availbale for blogging platforms (e.g. Wordpress) you can make it look really fancy without too much effort.

That is also the reason why I wouldn't prefer posting material on this forum. There too many limitations in presentation and stuff tends to get lost in a forum. (just look at how many times similar questions are posted on forums) 

But you can always go for the AND option...the good news about digital is that it's easy to copy  8) so post it on a blog, post it here, post in the GC, on facebook...wherever

Offline Jaeru

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #28 on: November 05, 2014, 09:19:16 AM »
On a side note, does anyone know what the traffic potential is of a RM or HARP related blog? Assuming it has really good material of course.

Does the GC keep track of (and publicly share) its traffic to the magazine?

Offline Peter R

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #29 on: November 05, 2014, 09:31:09 AM »
On a real geeky technical point there is an issue with duplicating digital content in multiple locations that require one version to be specifically identified as the canonical version from which all others are duplicates and the duplicates should declare the url of the canonical version inthe page meta data.

This is easy enough to do but does add a straw to the camels back for the technician who is acting as curator for ICE.
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Offline Jaeru

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #30 on: November 05, 2014, 09:44:34 AM »
Well, that's what technicians are for  ;)

Offline Peter R

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #31 on: November 05, 2014, 09:53:35 AM »
Very true, I just wanted to make the point that just reproducing content here, there and everywhere is possible but not necessarly a ood idea unless your infrastructure is set up for it.
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Offline Thom @ ICE

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #32 on: November 05, 2014, 03:02:52 PM »
Just some thoughts to keep in mind from my personal opinions...


The Guild Companion,  Guild Companion Publications and Aurigas Aldebaron LLC are all separate legal entities.
AA allows GCP to use the IronCrown web pages because GCP has a license to produce AA owned IP products.


TGC is separate, and intentionally so.  TGC does at times share materials that are not ICE related.


A few comments about blogs...  Some bloggers do a great job. They put in the time and energy to continue to add content, and make a solid effort to provide quality material every time.  That is truly rare though as most individuals start with grand aspirations, and then fizzle out after a few posts.


Blogging on ICE website...  Bad idea.  It immediately draws into question the objectivity of the blogger, and adds extra work for ICE personnel to have to monitor and manage.  We already get enough undesired spam hitting the forums.  Trying to monitor blogs and the comments to them would be a real pain.


Blogging at TGC... Sounds like a good idea, though there is something to be said for the quality editing work that the folks at TGC do - and the monthly aspect gives you a little more volume rather than going to the site for each individual article.  I guess as long as they use the push out notification process, they could move away from monthly and simply go to as ready - but that's a TGC discussion and I'll leave it to them to figure out what works best.


Blogging on the internet... Best solution.  If there are people that want to blog, do it.  Tell us about your blog and provided you don't spend your time trashing ICE, we'll probably help you out in promoting it - including links from Facebook, forums, or potentially even our newsletter.


As for the comment about formatting and losing stuff on the forums... The search function works pretty well, and with attachments you can do just about any kind of formatting you want, but I do understand it's not the same as working on many other programs. 
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Offline Peter R

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #33 on: November 06, 2014, 02:05:53 AM »
A few comments about blogs...  Some bloggers do a great job. They put in the time and energy to continue to add content, and make a solid effort to provide quality material every time.  That is truly rare though as most individuals start with grand aspirations, and then fizzle out after a few posts.


Blogging on ICE website...  Bad idea.  It immediately draws into question the objectivity of the blogger, and adds extra work for ICE personnel to have to monitor and manage.  We already get enough undesired spam hitting the forums.  Trying to monitor blogs and the comments to them would be a real pain.


Blogging at TGC... Sounds like a good idea, though there is something to be said for the quality editing work that the folks at TGC do - and the monthly aspect gives you a little more volume rather than going to the site for each individual article.  I guess as long as they use the push out notification process, they could move away from monthly and simply go to as ready - but that's a TGC discussion and I'll leave it to them to figure out what works best.


Blogging on the internet... Best solution.  If there are people that want to blog, do it.  Tell us about your blog and provided you don't spend your time trashing ICE, we'll probably help you out in promoting it - including links from Facebook, forums, or potentially even our newsletter.


As for the comment about formatting and losing stuff on the forums... The search function works pretty well, and with attachments you can do just about any kind of formatting you want, but I do understand it's not the same as working on many other programs.

Your first quoted point above is my experience and is a point I made earlier. The point about moving away from the monthly format to the go as ready I disagree with. The best (for which read most successful) blogs actually have a formal publication cycle so that readers know when and how frequently to return. They are more like columnists in a newspaper. If you regularly buy a paper you will know that certain columnist will be in there on particular days of the week. That does not mean that every article has to be published on the same day and you can have a rolling monthly output with particular articles put out on particular days of the month. As a rule I would suggest steering clear of go as ready.

The ICE blog, the only thing I would suggest goes on there would be the directors briefing and details of new product launches, requests for play testers and so on. It could be treated as a branded news and discussion channel. The benefits you guys would have to weigh up.

I certainly agree wth the last two points.
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Offline Jaeru

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #34 on: November 06, 2014, 02:14:54 AM »
Quote
A few comments about blogs...  Some bloggers do a great job. They put in the time and energy to continue to add content, and make a solid effort to provide quality material every time.  That is truly rare though as most individuals start with grand aspirations, and then fizzle out after a few posts.

That is so very true...been there and its what keeps me from blogging for the time being...the ambition is there though...I just have to find a modus operandi so I know I'll be able to generate content on a regular basis. Otherwise, why bother?

Quote
...and with attachments you can do just about any kind of formatting you want...

You can? I've been using this forum system for my pbp games for years now (over at realroleplaying), but I wouldn't know how to recreate the same formatting I can do on my wordpress site...but that could just be my lack of technical skills.

Offline Thom @ ICE

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #35 on: November 06, 2014, 06:16:52 AM »
The reference to formatting was that you could do the formatting in Word, Excel, Paint, whatever and we allow a large number of different file formats to be attached, therefore you can show almost any formatting you want.... not the same as having it in the article that way - but you can do it.
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Offline Peter R

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #36 on: November 07, 2014, 04:08:48 AM »
Who is up for a bit of an experiment?

I have mentioned to Thom @ ICE, Peter Mork and Markc a while ago about writing an article for the guild companion. That article turned into three articles none of which I have finished writing to my satisfaction.

I have all the technical prerequisites to set up a wordpress blog quickly and easily.

I could take the three articles I have yet to complete plus other articles I had in mind and start a RM based blog. Any stats would be RM2/RMC based and the world setting would be mostly Forgotten Realms as that is where my creative output is being directed.

I would make the analytics available (in this thread?) to those that are interested in blogging.

I would then like to try and write a column for the guild companion about the blog and any challenges to throws up if that would interest TGC readers?

I think I could keep it up for a year just based on ideas I have right now and I would expect more to come up as I am writing it. It would be interesting to see how many traffic sources the blog would pick up that are not existing AA/ICE/TGC sites.

I would also be happy to then post guest contributions from others so that people like Jaeru would have to option to publish a blog post on an ad hoc basis without the burden of committing to regular blog or testing the waters before starting their own blog.

I think a section on here for fan based blogs would not hurt and (I could be frightenly wrong here) to do a once a month visit to each blog to make sure it was still acceptable to link to. As you say you would not want to link out to people who are damaging the reputation of ICE and Rolemaster.

I cannot foresee there being thousands of them so visiting each one once a month would not be too onerous. If it were me I would use an aggregator so I wouldn't even have to visit them if they haven't posted anything new.
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Offline Inez Hull

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #37 on: November 07, 2014, 04:14:42 AM »
Peter R it certainly couldn't hurt to try.  I'd love to see a RM blogging community, even if small and anything that might help contribute to it is a good thing.  Now I just have to get my own butt into gear

Offline Peter R

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #38 on: November 07, 2014, 05:08:30 AM »
It got to be worth a crack hasn't it.

I have to finish sorting out my characters DPs for Warls game tonight or I will end up holding up the whole game. This weekend I will register a domain, install wordpress and configure Google Analytics.
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Offline Jaeru

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Re: Rolemaster blogs
« Reply #39 on: November 07, 2014, 05:16:38 AM »
Sounds like a plan!