"Multiple, independent blogs calling themselves a community and using blogrolls and blog rings is really old fashioned. This once-popular method of trying to create a community of individual blogs seems so old-fashioned now, and I believe its' time is over."
Right now I'm glad I'm just someone who writes a lot about EVE Online and not an actual EVE blogger. Maybe that standing will allow me to hide from the upcoming wars over those who wish to control the traffic and the hits so many pursue.
The current fight is over the status of evebloggers.com. The popular aggregator of EVE blogs is down, according to some, because Marc Scaurus, acting at the behest of The Mittani, wishes to drive traffic to TheMittani.com. Marc has posted that he has six people willing to take over the site, although I don't know how many of them were aware that the blog feed would break when Google finally killed Google Reader. Well, I guess some people will believe anything as long as anti-Goon hatred is added to the mix.
I think the big issue is that Marc wants to hand both the reigns of evebloggers.com and the EVE Blog Pack to someone with a proven history of sticking with the blogging community. Alexia Morgan, someone who wishes to become a leader, if not THE leader, doesn't like those conditions. And I don't blame Alexia, because those conditions excluded Alexia from taking over those duties.
I did a quick background check of Alexia. That name is associated with a blog, Punishment, that was very active from 4 January 2009 to 10 January 2010, went dark for 17 months until the last six posts were made between 19 May 2011 - 10 September 2011. Alexia then took another year break from blogging before creating a new blog, Touring New Eden, in November 2012.
In November, Alexia came up with the idea that the EVE blogosphere needed to change.
"Back in.... gee, I don't know - a long time ago! I created www.evebloggers.com to bring together all the Eve Online bloggers under a common banner, so the Eve Online Bloggers Portal came into existence. It successfully aggregated blog posts by all active Eve Online bloggers, as well as podcasts, YouTube videos, and even related images on Flickr.Alexia's vision is to create a community site to host all the "blogs".
"It was so successful that it's still recognised today as a leading method of keeping up to date with Eve Online blogs.
"But that was SO 'last decade'.
"Eve blogging is changing, and that's been very obvious to me. It needs to change, it needs to evolve with these changing times we're living in."
"All 'blogs', however, will be subdomains of the main community site, to promote the community. Once it's well established, I will probably allow integration of custom domains to be integrated into the community site, so that members can have www.mydomain.com while still using the communitysite.net features as their backend. But that will be a feature enabled down the road.And of course, Alexia thought about resistance from bloggers.
"It's a community site, and so it's going to have a very active presence which is likely to require various levels of support. There will be issues with new memberships, with profile and blog setups, or with various site functionality. All issues will need to be resolved in a timely manner. There will need to be moderators of the forums, even administrators of the site to help out with support issues."
"I know there's going to be quite a few current bloggers who are so ingrained into being independent that they're not going to support this with their involvement, but I have to ask - if you really want a community that's going to take us into the next few years, why wouldn't you get involved in helping to build it?The idea didn't get a lot of reaction and seemed to die at the end of November, and with it Alexia's posting.
"I can't do it alone, and I don't want to. I can't build a community by myself - that's not what a community is about. I need prominent Eve bloggers - all of them! - to get involved, to move away from their old-fashioned, independent blogs and set up a presence for themselves in this new community site."
Well, Alexia has the site up and running. I don't have to worry about this because, since I'm not an EVE blogger, I couldn't participant even if I wanted to. Which I don't. I think anyone joining it for the purposes of blogging is making a poor long term decision. The Eve blogosphere has seen hosting sites before go out of business overnight with no warning. But I linked it anyway because I can always be wrong. Besides, since I have no dog in this fight, I can just grab some popcorn, sit back and enjoy the show.
