Friday, January 23, 2009

The MMO Virus: Blogging

If you came here looking for some more pictures of me falling to my death, I suggest you go read some old posts. I don't blame you for wanting to cackle in glee as I showcase my agility at ramming my skull into the earth. That tendency of mine will hopefully end before I make it over to Thousand Needles. Though I do have something evil in mind to foil the next suicide attempt by going into engineering and picking up a parachute cloak.

Brief nerd info: Parachute comes from both a French word with a Latin prefix. Para meaning "counter" and chute meaning "fall".

/RemoveTangent

What I wanted to talk about today is the "art" of blogging or having a website in general. I feel like a virus.
Let me go through this analogy with you. People make blogs to be heard, to tell others their opinions about whatever subject that particular blog focuses on. Success or survival of a blog is to continue to grow in terms of viewers, and to continue that growth until it reaches critical mass. Like a virus, I want my website to spread everywhere, to "infect" people into becoming non-readers into...well readers.

Of course to be a successful "virus" you have to be different than all the other viruses out there, or you'll be eradicated. There are so many more analogies you can throw in here, the electronic "survival of the fittest" so to speak when it comes to having a successful webpage. I'm not claiming my website is a success story however.

I'm still infecting people.

I would love to look back at this page a year from now and say " Wow, look at my evil empire."

The "infection" is the greatest part of the success of a webpage. How quickly you spread the word about your website, how well you keep reader's interests, and by doing so well your current readers cannot help but talk about you to non-readers. Without one of these you won't do too much outside of a few personal friends visiting your site.

Without all three you're doomed to mediocrity.

Of course I have a heavy dose of ignorance when it comes to those three key elements. I'm still fresh, young, naive, and insane so instead of yelling across the globe with a great thunderclap " Here I am, read my stuff cause I think I'm spiffy!" I do a small cough to get your attention and mutter something about pie.(That probably would get my attention rather quickly if that happened..)

I bet you're wondering why I'm rambling on so. This epiphany came to me while performing my customer service duties for my day job. And being the nerd that I am, the whole similarity between trying to build a successful webpage/blog and a virus stuck me as somewhat insightful.
So with that in mind I wanted to talk about it as I happen to have such a webpage that is still in it's growing pains.

Hmm..

I guess my goal is to go from being a small cold to being a world wide epidemic that causes mass hysteria and panic. Much like the Scourge in World of Warcraft.(Ha! It's MMO related now!) So eventually I hope to have legions of people all chanting..

"For Danshir.." in guttural zombie speech, and I frankly don't think that is too much to ask. Especially since the Zombie Revolution will be coming along any day now...

5 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. So which do you think makes for more success: being able to infect a bunch of the same kind of host really well, or being able to infect a lot of different varieties of host?

    (I majored in molecular biology; therefore I love this analogy.)

    P.S. Sorry about the deletion/replacement there; I didn't realize I'd used a less infectious strain when the comment posted. Bother the Blogger default!

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  3. @Ravyn I think it would be the first one right, since 99.9% of the people that read this blog are likely into MMORPGs themselves?

    See Danshir, you're idea of a blog and mine are very different. See you have something called "content". XD I kid I lkid.. but yeah my blog is not about readers or #'s, but rather more of an online diary! If anyone wants to read, thats cool, but I would do it either way.

    By no means is this a diss on your blog! I love your blog, its really good reading. I'm gunna start commenting on it more and stuff, keep the discussion going.

    Just pointing out some of the fundamental differences between "diary style" bloggers and you guys. Not sure what to call you but.. :P "journalist style?" but more like "epinion style" :P

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  4. Bah! Danshir is just trying to make his E-Penis larger and more pronounced lol. But his blog does seem more journalistic than most which isn't a bad thing lol.

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  5. Yes, I want to infect the same type of host, generally because only those interested in MMOs would be interested by my writing.

    Blogs generally are more like an online diary. Which is great really, I enjoy reading those type of blogs all the time, including yours Mr. Cownose. However I wanted to try to mix a type of diary with some elements of journalism if possible.

    Mostly because I enjoy it.

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