Exploring the WoW blogosphere

My experiment continues. My WoW blog has now been going on for a couple of weeks and still I just have this flood of reflections in my mind, just wanting to get out. I really don't lack ideas of what to write about. The question is: does it have any value at all to others than me? The visitors are few - just a couple every day. The comments as well - you can count them on the fingers of one hand. I can't tell if it's because the things I blog about are uninteresting or if it's just that the blog is completely unknown to anyone except for my closes WoW-friends.

As one step out of my isolation I've joined the blog community Blog Azeroth, writing an introduction to my blog. This is a huge and very much alive blog network, where people give each other feedback and share ideas on topics to blog about, discuss things that are NOT suitable to have in your blog and give each other ideas about technical issues, such as how to avoid gold seller ads. Over all the members try to help each other keeping the enthusiasm and the creative flow going, when it sometimes feels like if you're just throwing out your thoughts into a big black void.

Still the community forum is in English, and in my introduction to my own blog I had to admit it was Swedish. Quick I got a respons from someone who thought I should connect the blog to an automatic translation service, such as Babelfish. Unfortunately I've so far only found one tool that could translate from Swedish to English, worldlingo, and the little test I did by running the blog through it was quite depressing. I don't know if it was because of the words I use when I write or if it really lacks knowledge in English. However, it wasn't any pleasure to read it.

Another alternative is to go over to blogging in English from the beginning, in order to get the chance of a slightly bigger audience and exchange of ideas with others. But even though my English is decent, it takes quite a deal of extra work after all. I tried to translate a few of my first postings and I soon saw that I used way to many words for my own best. It will simply cause me too much work. And I can't help it, but I think that something goes lost once you're deserting your native tongue.

So for now being I'm keeping to the Swedish. I've started to look a bit for other Swedish WoW blogs that I could cooperate with. And if nothing else, we could after all start commenting on each other. That's a well tried out trix you can do, according to the blogging gurus of Blog Azeroth, it won't just give you more traffic, it can also create a nice interactivity with the readers, give you new things to blog about.

Unfortunately my random looking for Swedish blogging colleagues has been rather unsuccessful. There are a few WoW blogs, but the quality of them.. sigh" One screenshot on your char, in best case a few words about what you've been up to. The updates are sporadic or the blogs are deserted altogether. A brilliant exception so far is Consentire, who in a nice pedagogic way inspire to raiding, give hints about addons, the art of gold grinding and other useful stuff. But except for him, there isn't much worth reading.

It's so different in the English speaking blogosphere. I was surprised once I had a look at it. Here are blogs of all sorts. Everything from role playing stylish diaries from the characters point of view, to educated lectures on different classes. Some are full of screenshots, looking just like cheerful cartoons. Others are more simple, like this one (well I WILL try to throw in a screenshot from time to time, it's a promise!)

Personally I prefer blogs with a personal tone. It's hard to describe, but I want there to be a colour or flavour which keeps the blog together, and makes it feel not just like any other news services or informative website. And it also should be clear that the writer actually likes to blog, that it's a passion rather than something he or she does out of duty, just something that has to be done.

Readers or no readers, I'll keep pouring out my thoughts into the unknown. Mostly no one's arguing against me. If you see it from the bright side it's always nice to get the last word.