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Making it as an MMO blogger: The community manager interviews part 2
If you enjoyed our community management feature from yesterday, we present you with part 2! What level of honesty should bloggers have regarding the benefits and flaws of your game in balancing the interests of the readers and the interests of your company? David Bass: Bloggers should always be honest. But they should also be fair. Yes, game X might have some issues, but is the company consistently working to improve the game? Are you seeing excellent communication from the team? No MMO is perfect, that's for certain, but in addition to learning where our flaws are, we're also interested to learn what we're doing right. Bloggers aren't there to cater to us as a company, and if your blog is heading in that direction, most readers will notice that and may choose to shy away from it. If you stick to being honest on your blog, that's what will get the company to notice you.
Making it as an MMO blogger: An interview with top community managers
Ahh, that eternal debate about what differentiates a gaming blogger from a gaming journalist. We could go on and on about specifics on both sides, but the fact is, we all have the same goals in mind: writing about what we love. Ravious at Kill Ten Rats approached us with an idea he's been working on for a few months involving MMO bloggers and their relationship with community managers. We thought this was a brilliant idea as a valuable hub of information for MMO bloggers, and offered to help him get it kick-started. So we sent off his questions to nine of the top community managers in the industry to get their take on how bloggers can establish and grow a favorable working relationship with them. With so much information here, we broke it into two parts: one today and the conclusion tomorrow. Follow along for their answers to part one!
A new blogger survey, this time for DPS
Last weekend we spotlighted the big healer survey that went around the blogosphere a little while back -- it was chock full of information straight from healers about their classes and abilities and what they thought of them. Now, Death Goddess is aiming to do the same thing for DPS classes. She's only got a few blogs who've answered so far, but they run a good range, from hunter to warlock to mage, and maybe getting the word out like this will encourage a few more DPS-style bloggers to put their answers in the pot. As long as we're going to keep encouraging this meme (or non-meme, as they may be saying), I'd love to see some of this stuff quantified a little bit more. It'd be interesting to put into numbers which kinds of classes like their roles best, or which situations each role likes to play more (do healers prefer raiding over 5-mans, or do DPS prefer to play solo rather than PvP?). The healer survey was a treasure trove of raw anecdotal information, but it'd be good to see this put into a spreadsheet or graph, and maybe give us a more quantified look at what people think of their class. We'll keep an eye on the DPS data and maybe try hashing it out once the list of those surveyed becomes pretty substantial.
Squarespace hosting/CMS service launches iPhone app
After a long wait, Squarespace customers finally have an iPhone app of their own. Squarespace is a hosted blogging/CMS service that competes with the likes of WordPress.com and Typepad. Having used all three, I can say that interacting with Squarespace (posting, changing your site's look and feel, etc.) is unlike the others. Instead of a separate control panel/dashboard, Squarespace previews changes in real time on the same screen. It's really nice. The iPhone app [iTunes link] seems to be an extension of its browser-based sibling. For example, check out the live preview mode pictured at right. You can also manage multiple accounts, post, upload multiple images at once (awesome) view stats and more. The UI looks nice as well. While bloggers on other platforms have had compatible apps in the App Store for a while now, this is Squarespace's first solution. We're eager to play around with it. Squarespace for iPhone is free and requires a paid Squarespace account.
iPhone apps that bloggers will love
wpbeginner has posted a terrific list of 10 iPhone apps that every blogger will love. The first item on the list is, as you'd expect, WordPress for iPhone. Version 2.0 was released earlier this week and it's a huge improvement over its predecessor. It supports blogs powered by both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress.org. WordPress 2.0 for iPhone is free. Add as many blogs as you like and manage comments, posts and pages all from the app. Adding new pages and posts is as easy as editing existing ones. Best of all, you can delete, edit approve/unapprove and spam comments with a few taps. Of course, not every blogger uses WordPress, and the other apps on the list acknowledge this. Shape Writer aims to make it easier to enter text by letting you trace the "shape" of a word rather than type its letters. Proper names and acronyms can be "taught" to the app by typing them once. They'll be traceable from that point on. Shape Writer costs $3.99US. Also on the list is Jott, a voice-to-text app that records your voice, converts it to text and lets you send the result nearly anywhere, including a WordPress or Blogger blog (as well as Twitter, Facebook and more). I haven't tested it, so I can't speak for how well it works. If it does what it claims (speak up if you've used it), Jott for iPhone will make it much easier to publish long posts from your iPhone (provided that it supports your preferred platform). Jott for iPhone is free and requires a Jott Assist Plan, which starts at $3.95/mo. Mel reviewed the similar Voice on the Go service last week. Visit wpbeginner for the rest of the list. As for me, I get a lot of use out of Instapaper (for reading reference articles when I'm away from my computer) and Evernote (pretty much the same reason) among others. If you want the simplest blog-from-your-iPhone solution, check out Posterous. All you need to do to set up and maintain a Posterous blog is send an email to post@posterous.com. It doesn't get simpler than that. [Via Wired]
Quick and easy podcasting with an iPhone 3GS, GarageBand, and Posterous
I love podcasting. My first podcasts weren't really podcasts, just recordings that I made and uploaded to a website in the late 90's so that other people could listen to them. Unlike the podcasts we know and love today, there was no way to subscribe to all of the episodes that I recorded. When podcasting as we know it hit the world in 2004, I started hosting podcasts through one of my companies. Despite creating two long-running podcasts between 2004 and 2007, I finally gave up because of the time involved. Part of the problem was due to me being a stickler for perfection in my podcasts, while the rest was due to the fact that I was stuck with podcasting when I was near my iMac and could edit and update a feed file on a regular basis. Earlier this month, I decided that I wanted to start up a personal podcast again. Yeah, I talk about tech, but for the most part I wanted this to be a free-form podcast that could talk about photography one day, music the next, and the joys of being a cat owner the third. Since my calendar is already pretty well jammed, the only way I was going to be able to commit to doing a podcast every day was to get the podcast workflow down to as little time as possible.
PicPosterous for the iPhone is nearly perfect
I've spent the last few weeks with Posterous, a blogging platform from Sachin Agarwal and Garry Tan. The result is both a modest record of my travels and a powerful enthusiasm for the service. Posterous is going to be huge. Even Andy says so. Over the years, I've used every blogging platform I've found, including (but not limited to) WordPress, Typepad, MovableType, Squarespace, Vox, Livejournal, Blogger and Textpattern. The easiest among those are the hosted solutions, like Typepad, Livejournal, Blogger, Squarespace and Vox (note that Typepad, Livejournal and Vox are all products of Six Apart). WordPress and MovableType are (usually) self-hosted and require the blogger* to create and link to a database. After installation is complete, they all require some degree of fiddling. Customizing the layout, design, colors, graphics etc. takes time. Adding something like an image gallery is even more time consuming, and often requires a plug-in which you must find, upload, configure and test on your own. By contrast, here's how you create a complete blog with Posterous: Send an email message to post@posterous.com. That's it. Here's how you create a full-featured, thumbnailed photo gallery with built-in navigation on Posterous: Email your photos to post@posterous.com. Want to post a video? Same thing. It'll even encode it for you. Send nearly any codec you want. It's brilliant because there's nothing to learn. Everyone knows how to send an email message and customers can use the email client they already know; the client that's always available via a laptop, phone or iPod. Additionally, Posterous can notify your other accounts, like Facebook and Twitter, each time an update is posted. The only drawback I found was in updating a gallery throughout the day. Let's say I want to document a trip with multiple photos added to a single post as the day progressed. How can I do that? PicPosterous [App Store link] is the answer. I spent the last couple of weeks using a beta of PicPosterous and spoke with Sachin about it. Click below to read my reaction and conversation with Sachin. %Gallery-70824% *Some web hosting companies provide a one-click install for WordPress and MovableType. Wordpress.com also provides free and premium plans for WordPress users.
BlizzCon 2009: What we're bringing
We're spending our day traveling to BlizzCon, so we figured while we were still in the air, we'd let you in on a little trade industry secret: what we're bringing to the show. The gallery below offers you a look at just what it takes to turn out the kind of BlizzCon coverage we'll be bringing you this weekend -- the tech, the gear, and the, er, beverages.We're just hoping security lets us through with all of this stuff. Especially Alex -- oh sure, the hammer's fine, but that JCVD-endorsed caffeinated gum is the kind of thing that will get you pulled out of line. If he's not there in time for the meetup tonight, you'll know why.%Gallery-70540% BlizzCon 2009 is here! WoW.com has continuing coverage, bringing you the latest in Cataclysm news, live blogs, galleries, and reports right from the convention floor. Check out WoW.com's Guide to BlizzCon for the latest!
The Queue: I don't really know what's happening here
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.The video I've included in today's edition of The Queue is... something. It is certainly a thing. A thing that is entirely unrelated to WoW. I know the music is produced by Justice, but the video? Well. It's a video. Enjoy?corwin asked... "Is anything more going to be done with the Grizzly Hills Venture Bay PVP areas? It seems like it has a lot of potential and isn't paid any attention."
The Daily Quest: Booze and bacon
We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Skeleton Jack covers a pair of dual wield builds for Death Knights in Patch 3.2, when dual wielding will make a comeback for the class. Nourish has yet another tasty treat for us: Broken Isles Iced Tea. I'm a little confused, though. I think they forgot the booze! Runeforge Gossip thinks that WoW's PvP could learn a few things from DotA. This link has absolutely nothing to do with WoW whatsoever, but it has inspired me to make a few strips of bacon with whatever I decide to have for dinner tonight. Click here to submit a link to TDQ
iPhoto2Twitter 1.5 adds movie and Mobypicture support
Back in June, TUAW reported on iPhoto2Twitter, an iPhoto plugin that provides an easy way to send photos from your iPhoto library to Twitter via TwitPic. Now the developer, Blue Crowbar Software, is back with an update that adds support for sending photos and movies from your iPhone or digital camera to Mobypicture.com. Mobypicture is an online service that lets you upload a photo or movie once, then distribute the media to a number of different social sites and blogging tools. At this time, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Blogger, Vimeo, WordPress, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Vimeo, Jaiku, Hyves, and BrightKite are all supported.As before, iPhoto2Twitter is available for €4.95 (approximately US$7.03) directly from the developer's website. Blue Crowbar's Aperture2Twitter has also been updated to add various social media and blogging sites through Mobypicture, and it's now available for €5.95 (about US$8.47).
How to get your blog crashed by WoW.com
Every day, our tip line gets a number of requests for link exchanges, publicity, and feedback on whether a post would be good for inclusion in the Daily Quest. We're really happy to be able to direct traffic to bloggers with good information, but sometimes we get requests that leave us baffled, uncomfortable, or both. While it's pretty easy to deal with some of these (gold-selling sites wishing to advertise here are a quick, "No thanks"), some of them come from otherwise well-meaning bloggers who want a link, but who may not get the desired results from one. Naturally this leaves us with a bit of a dilemma, and these are the things I think about while nosing around incoming links and my own list of favorite blogs:Please don't ask us to link your blog. Ask us to link a post.Even if we love your site and we read it all the time, we still need a reason to link you that's relevant to a subject we're writing about. Readers dislike getting recommendations like "It's a great blog!" or "You're going to love it!" Uh, why is it a great blog? Why should they love it? Nothing speaks so loudly or effectively as a great post on a good topic. Moreover, if we're linking a post of yours, your blog's main page should be linked as well. Even if we got dumb and forgot, it should be a simple matter for readers to find your central page (and you've got a design problem on your hands if they can't).
The Daily Grind: Are you enjoying The Land of the Dead?
The Call to Arms live expansion for Warhammer Online was over six months in the making. It gave WAR players the Choppa and Slayer classes, RvR tokens, keep upgrades, and culminated last week in the arrival of The Land of the Dead mega-zone. Massively wants to know if you're enjoying it.We've been keeping tabs on various WAR bloggers who have shared their thoughts. Keen feels that the zone flips a bit too easily but is happy with the new content overall. LotD isn't the mecca of RvR that Bootae had hoped for, but he's still quite pleased with the quality of it (over the quantity). As for Thulf, well he was actually drawn back to WAR after a couple months' absence to give it a shot. It's too early for him to tell whether or not he'll keep his subscription open for it.This writer is still waiting for the dust to settle. I don't know if there are any major issues with the zone or its effect on RvR, but I'm hesitant to jump in head first and have my experience spoiled by anything. The ancient undead can wait a little longer for this explorer.
Choose my Adventure: Insert funny title about being level 25 here
WoW.com readers, it's up to you to decide the fate of Turpen the Gnome Warlock with Choose My Adventure. Help test the site's new features by participating in this event, casting your vote toward the many aspects of Turpen and following his exploits on Alex Ziebart's WoW.com profile!Well, you guys wanted me to run Deadmines. As you can see, I ran Deadmines. Many thanks go to Urse (Healer), Child (Tank), and Sneafoo (Noob Rogue of Doom) for 4-manning the thing with me. Urse was pretty overleveled for the place so healing was hilariously easy, but Sneafoo made up for it by starting the run at level 12 and aggroing Gruul from the pirate ship.I went further than that, too. I didn't stop at Deadmines, I did Wailing Caverns, Blackfathom Deeps and Shadowfang Keep as well. I was kicking around the idea as soon as someone suggested Deadmines, but I didn't think I would manage to land a group for either of them. When I went out to the Barrens to get my Succubus (Angva) at level 20, that sealed the deal for me. I picked up the quest The Orb of Soran'ruk, and despite the fact that its quest rewards sucked, it gave me more reason to try and get the groups together. I put out a call to all of the various resources I knew, LFG and community chat channels (your server probably has a few good ones) and all of that, and managed to score a few groups.
The Daily Quest: Sometimes simple is best
We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. This Saturday, the guild Exodus will be joining Stompalina and crew on the Rawrcast. It kicks off immediately after our own podcast, so give it a listen! Part seven of Too Many Annas' epic Angrathar fiction has been posted. James Peripheral, one of WoW.com's user bloggers, tells the world why he plays MMOs. Why? Family. Big Hit Box supplies some very basic tips for players new to grouping as melee. All of you new Death Knights and Retribution Paladins might want to take a look. Ret Vets get a pass. Do you have children that play WoW? Are you concerned that they might be seeing things in chat channels that they shouldn't be? NoStockUI has some suggestions for the parent that wants their child's game experience to be a little safer. Click here to submit a link to TDQ
Is SWTOR hype peaking too early?
We were bound to get juicy new details about Star Wars: The Old Republic at E3 2009 and we surely haven't been disappointed thus far. In this week alone we have learned about the new Smuggler class, fan art ownership policy, full in-game voiceovers, and an amazing cinematic trailer. Hype is definitely in full swing, but is it peaking too early?MMO blogger, Tobold, believes it is. He suggests players have seen very little of SWTOR's in-game substance at this point and BioWare is raising expectations to unrealistic heights by hyping the game so early. He cites Mythic and Funcom as examples of companies that built early hype based on fancy words, design concepts, and trailers and then experienced a fan backlash when players perceived that they did not meet those targets.Darren of the Common Sense Gamer disagrees and believes that the Star Wars lore is being over-hyped, not the game itself. He also argues that anything Star Wars-related traditionally hypes itself and that a great trailer about the game's history and story should be appreciated for what it is and set apart from the game itself.
The Daily Quest: Go go gadget rocket boots
We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Graylo of Gray Matter talks stat weights and spell priorities for the second in a pair of Moonkin builds. Rogue-Rogue reacts to the Nitro Boots stealth nerf from patch 3.1.2. Shields Up! pulls together a few essential macros for Shaman of all flavors. Hunter DPS has changed significantly since The Burning Crusade, shifting from a shot rotation to more of a shot priority system. If you're not sure what that means, you should probably read this. Do you have something you'd like to blog about, but you weren't sure where to say it? Make use of WoW.com's new blogging system! It's free, and we'd love to see what all of you can do with it. Silly or serious, we want to hear about it! Click here to submit a link to TDQ
EVE Online's blogging community reaches 235 blogs
Like Star Trek and Marmite, the world is divided into two sections: those who love EVE Online unconditionally and those who just don't get it. While I confess I'm definitely in the latter (insert clichéd and overused learning curve reference here), most of Team Massively seem to adore the game - specifically the mining and making-money-to-buy-bigger-ships part.Such is the way of 2009 that it is possible to gauge the popularity of a game just by seeing how many people blog or tweet about a game. Indeed blogger CrazyKinux has started listing them, and according to his calculations, there are currently 235 EVE blogs with the number growing every day. If you want to take a look at the full, regularly-updated blogroll, you can check it out here.
Introductory Post: New Blogger Kelly Guimont
Howdy! (That's a traditional greeting from Out West.) I'm a new blogger here on TUAW. I made an appearance here from Macworld 2008 when I demonstrated software on the show floor. I've been a Macintosh user in some form or another since very early on (I drew with a turtle and don't understand versions of Oregon Trail that are anything but green), and I'm currently Leopard Certified. I live in Portland, Oregon, which is a great place to be a Mac Geek since we have three Apple retail stores and loads of Mac places besides. My current setup is a Unibody MacBook and an iPhone 3G, but I still get some mileage out of my 80gb iPod and I still have a PowerBook G4 and a blueberry iMac DV around in case I need them -- you never know! My house has a lot of gadgetry (right now the network has about a dozen IP addresses assigned) and general geekery: Star Wars, Disney, and Lord Of The Rings tidbits are all over the place. As writing goes, I've written all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons/groups/publications such as Mac|Life and local computer magazines, blogged here and there, and written short stories and other pieces just for fun. In my copious amounts of free time, I help organize events within the Portland Tech community including Open Source Bridge and Beer and Blog, and I am the head of the Portland WordPress User Group, spreading the blogging love wherever I can. I am very excited to be part of TUAW and as I'm sure anyone who knows me will tell you, I can't wait for you to hear what I have to say! :)
Mars Edit 2.3 adds Tumblr support
MarsEdit has long been one of my Mac apps and save my writings for TUAW and Download Squad, it's what I use for almost all of my online publishing. For almost two years, I've been embroiled in a love/hate relationship with Tumblr. I love the idea of the service, but until recently, the simplicity it offers has come at the expense of features I really, really need. This week, I've come one-step closer to making Tumblr a bigger part of my digital life, because MarsEdit now supports Tumblr blogs!MarsEdit 2.3, which was released on Tuesday now supports Tumblr, in addition to WordPress, Movable Type, LiveJournal and other blogging platforms. Daniel Jalkut, the developer of MarsEdit, announced that he was planning support for Tumblr back in December, after started working with Tumblr's Marco Arment on improving the Tumblr API.After a brief beta period, official Tumblr support is finally here, and it is good. To my knowledge, MarsEdit is the only blog client, for Mac or Windows, that supports Tumblr. Sure, there are some great iPhone (and even a BlackBerry application), but there hasn't been any support for an actual desktop client.Inevitably, some users will question why Tumblr needs client support at all. After all, isn't the whole point of Tumblr to be fast, easy and simple? Sure, but when composing longer entries or when you want to write drafts, an external client is still superior. There's nothing worse than having all of your hard work erased by a misbehaving web browser, or wanting to access a draft or an old post while on a plane or some other place without Internet access. MarsEdit 2.3 supports text, photo, quote, link and chat post templates (though you can easily use HTML to embed video and audio in a regular text post). You can also easily add tags to a post. Image posting is extremely easy, just drag an image from the web, your own library or a folder into the image button at the top of the post. If I had any real request, it would be that the "tweet this post" toggle be included as a MarsEdit option. Otherwise, my Tumblr needs have been addressed.MarsEdit 2.3 is a free upgrade for existing users and news users can snag a copy for $29.95. It requires Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.5.
