Community Event / Creation Fan Sites - Elite: Dangerous Webring (idea)
- Thread starter Penthux
- Start date
I;m not sure a webring is the way to go. There are other ways and means of growing a community and sharing links.
Simply sharing links among all the various sites shouldn't be too hard with the many free tools out there (tumblr, wordpress, blogger etc). A central webring is to reliant on centralised administration whereas linking to who you want to, and returning links to those who link to you, means we're all free to connect to content we like and avoid association with content we're less keen on.
I come from a history of blogging about EVE (the archive is no more unfortunately, there are a couple of posts I managed to salvage on my current blog though) and the closest thing we had to a webring was something called 'The Blogpack'. This was initially set up and administered by one guy and was basically a curated list of blogs. He encouraged cross-linking, but the only pre-requisite for inclusion in the list was a link to the list. He culled inactive blogs occasionally, and ran a monthly cross blog event where someone would suggest a topic and we could choose to write about it or not, linking to everyone else's contributions in the process.
This blogging community is still going strong. Check out the #tweetfleet hashtag on twitter for most of the current crop. There are artists, economists, pirates, traders, warriors, and thieves all churning out content independently of the game and each other, but still relevant. The original guy, known as 'CrazyKinux' (his chosen handle) is no loger playing EVE, but his legacy lives on as others have taken on running the monthly events, and curating a whole slew of lists covering hundreds of blogs on every topic under the sun (mostly about EVE though).
This was all done with minimal input from CCP. For a long time all we had was a fansite kit, but someone realised the power of it and we started getting more perks. Understand this, we were not directly promoting the game with glowing reviews and endless founts of praise. Some did, but they were treated no differently to the rest of us who may have been more critical. And the sheer variety of sites and content available means that there really is something for everyone. CCP has no control over what we wrote/write apart from the copyright notice so we can use logos and images etc.
Frontier are missing a trick if you ask me.
This is just one example of how such a community can be encouraged to grow, thrive, and evolve. There's no set rulebook, but (and I deliberately didn't open with this) webrings are sooo late 90s ;D
ps: and ofc I realise there's nothing to stop me going out and starting my own initiative, there's room for everyone. After all we've got a whole galaxy...
pps: also, I'm still debating whether to join the webring, but if you link to me, I'll link to you. http://keithneilson.co.uk
Simply sharing links among all the various sites shouldn't be too hard with the many free tools out there (tumblr, wordpress, blogger etc). A central webring is to reliant on centralised administration whereas linking to who you want to, and returning links to those who link to you, means we're all free to connect to content we like and avoid association with content we're less keen on.
I come from a history of blogging about EVE (the archive is no more unfortunately, there are a couple of posts I managed to salvage on my current blog though) and the closest thing we had to a webring was something called 'The Blogpack'. This was initially set up and administered by one guy and was basically a curated list of blogs. He encouraged cross-linking, but the only pre-requisite for inclusion in the list was a link to the list. He culled inactive blogs occasionally, and ran a monthly cross blog event where someone would suggest a topic and we could choose to write about it or not, linking to everyone else's contributions in the process.
This blogging community is still going strong. Check out the #tweetfleet hashtag on twitter for most of the current crop. There are artists, economists, pirates, traders, warriors, and thieves all churning out content independently of the game and each other, but still relevant. The original guy, known as 'CrazyKinux' (his chosen handle) is no loger playing EVE, but his legacy lives on as others have taken on running the monthly events, and curating a whole slew of lists covering hundreds of blogs on every topic under the sun (mostly about EVE though).
This was all done with minimal input from CCP. For a long time all we had was a fansite kit, but someone realised the power of it and we started getting more perks. Understand this, we were not directly promoting the game with glowing reviews and endless founts of praise. Some did, but they were treated no differently to the rest of us who may have been more critical. And the sheer variety of sites and content available means that there really is something for everyone. CCP has no control over what we wrote/write apart from the copyright notice so we can use logos and images etc.
Frontier are missing a trick if you ask me.
This is just one example of how such a community can be encouraged to grow, thrive, and evolve. There's no set rulebook, but (and I deliberately didn't open with this) webrings are sooo late 90s ;D
ps: and ofc I realise there's nothing to stop me going out and starting my own initiative, there's room for everyone. After all we've got a whole galaxy...
pps: also, I'm still debating whether to join the webring, but if you link to me, I'll link to you. http://keithneilson.co.uk
Didn't webrings go extinct last century?
It seems the Elite Dangerous Webring is broken, it now shows .asp code.