Time to dig for new jewels of WoW blogging

The activity on many WoW blogs recently has decreased, as Typhoonandrew noticed in a grumpy post the other day. Without scientific proof – I don’t keep records, I don’t even read the blogs through feeds, so there’s no counting there – I must agree. I always get a lot of inspiration and input to my own blogging from reading other blogs, but lately I’ve had the feeling that I haven’t been fed with tons of ideas the way I’m used to.

Prefer playing
There are several explanations for this. One, obviously, is that the expansion is too good. We all have a limited amount of time to spend on the game. Questing and killing in Azeroth is just a small part of it – we probably spend about as much time planning our playing on guild forums, following discussions about theorycrafting on other forums, looking up strategies for dungeons and raid instances, reading blogs and listening to podcasts. It’s no wonder it’s hard to get time to write our own stuff.

Another explanation is the time of the year, which is very busy for many people. Projects are supposed to be completed before New Year, exams are upcoming and there’s a bunch of holidays, which not only will demand our mental and physical presence with our families, but also take some planning and preparation.

All in all I think it isn’t a too wild guess that whatever time we’ll be able to spend on WoW, we rather use for actually playing the game, levelling and gearing our toons, than blogging about it.

The Blogosphere
Still all hope isn’t lost for the addicted WoW blog reader. The Blogosphere contains a lot more awesome blogs than you have a clue about. Let’s be honest – isn’t it easy to become a bit lazy when it comes to blog reading? We establish habits where we check out the “established blogs” and the blogs which happened to be around when we started blogging or blog reading a year ago. We read the blogs that EVERYONE else will read and link to.

Do we really give the new bloggers the chance they deserve? Almost every day a new blogger is introduced at the Blog Azeroth forums. Do you check them out? And if you do so, do you give them a second review when they’ve been around for a month, to see if they have developed their blog a bit further? Hands up, who hasn’t been there, writing their first confused “I don’t know why I blog but I’ll try it out” post? It will take any blogger a few weeks to see what shape their blog will take. Don’t judge the newbies too quickly!

And if Blog Azeroth doesn’t give you enough of new food for thought you could brows through the blog list at Twisted Nether Wiki. That’s SOME list, isn’t it?

To get established
I think it’s a bit sad to see how hard it seems to a new blogger to get established. There’s something in the media logic that leads us wrong. Really, the blogs with the highest number of readers aren’t necessarily the ones that are most read worthy. And yet they keep attracting new readers, thanks to their size. There’s something magnetic in it. People seem to think that “so many readers can’t be wrong”. They can.

If you look at my blogroll I follow a mix of blogs. Some are well established – but there are also a number of not-quite-as-often-mentioned-ones. I could go on and give a little rant about every single one, but I’ll just give you a few examples of blogs which I enjoy and that aren’t mentioned and linked to quite as often as they deserve:

Groups of Words. This blog contains… a lot of words. Interesting, well written posts about a range of topics. You will never find a “look at this silly screenshot” post here. It isn’t updated quite as often as I’d wish as a starving reader. But when he writes, he does it well. Don’t be scared off by the layout, which appears a bit broken in my reader (IE). Content is king in my world, and this blog has content.

Altoholic's Are us. Altoholicmom writes personal posts, written from the perspective of a player who's been around for a very long time and knows the game by heart. But she also provides very useful posts, such as the Wrathgate guide the other day or the Northrend Daily Quest. The name is a bit decieving. This blog is NOT about how fun it is to create 9 alts on 10 different servers and level them to 20. You don't have to be a fan of alts to be a fan of Altoholicmom. Tis is a general WoW blog, and a very good one. She's obviously got 4 (four) readers. That's ridiculous. They should be 400. At least.

Artisan Level. It’s a mystery to me why I’m about the only blog I’ve seen linking to her. This blog is awesome. For some reason it makes me think of Chick GM (the wonderful blogger who’s been silent now for a couple of months, maybe because of health reasons, I hope you’re OK if you’re reading this). Oriniwen is a guild leader and shares her experiences, her victories and defeats, her worries and ideas, with all of us. Obviously she hasn’t got quite the same authority as Chick GM and her guild isn’t a cutting-edge raiding guild (what I understand). But she writes about guild life from the leader aspect in an honest, personal manner and I guarantee she’ll give you food for thought.

Greedy Goblin. If you follow his blog you’ll never get out of reading. He posts every single day, sometimes even twice and I can’t understand how he managed to keep it up. What makes this blog so fun is that it mixes good hands-on-advice about how to make gold in WoW efficiently with philosophical rants about economical laws in the game as well as in real life. I don’t always agree with Gevlon. He’s pretty provocative in his goblin views (just look at the comment he made on this blog yesterday… oh dear!) He loves to call people “stupid”, something Larísa wouldn’t dream of doing. And that’s why it’s so good. I want to be annoyed and provoked from time to time, I want to get stuff to think, even if I’ll turn up in a completely different position.

This was just four examples of jewels to be found. There are plenty more out there. Don’t complain about the lack of posting from the established blogs. Go out and have a look I’m sure you’ll find a lot of new nodes on the blog map, which you’ve overlooked until now, following your ordinary reading pattern. It’s time to make new discoveries.