Day 157 : It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

TL;DR : I had to say something, it wouldn’t get out of my damn head.

I commonly spend lunchtimes reading around the internet. Actually I used to spend lunchtimes reading around the internet. Now I spend lunchtimes keeping up with EVE blogs. I start out with the blog list I keep on this blog and then whenever there is spare time I try to follow a link to a blog I don’t know about. This has swiftly got out of control and I’m having to actively speed read and even skip posts I feel might not have any relevance to me. I even skipped the entire Blog Banter on e-sports because I had no real opinion on it so it saved a lot of time. I skimmed the entries but still couldn’t form enough of an opinion for a post.

Anyway, I was reading aroud when I came across Marc Scaurus post on http://scaurus.com/  describing how the EVE Blog Pack (http://blogpack.evebloggers.com/) and the blogging award called the Eeebees (http://www.evebloggers.com/?page_id=486) had come to be  neglected due to time constraints. The post was entitled “The Future of the Community” and outlined what a useful resource the blog pack was and yet how it needed constant input to remain valid. I’ve an interest in this since the EVE Blog Pack was both an inspiration and a launch point for my reading and writing about EVE. I’d like to see it survive.

A conversation in the comments of the post above led to a typically entertaining explosively styled blog post by Rixx Javix on EVEOGANDA. This claimed that themittani.com had killed the EVE community, highlighting recent drops in blog entries and some other long term blogs going dark. It’s a great style for getting a discussion started, it energises people into getting involved when they might otherwise have passed over a dry approach of the topic. It’s like using a forest fire to promote new growth but that once out of control just burns the entire place down. Rixx’s premise drew on Marc’s role as a writer for themittani.com to get started. Marc took opposition and fired back. Blog war. Kind of sad to see two excellent writers knocking chunks out of each other. Hang on. I think they are both great but pass the popcorn.

Seismic Stan over on Freebooted has a summary of all the posts culminating both Rixx and Marc on in the Podside cast.

http://freebooted.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/an-ecosystem-of-wordsmiths.html

So why I am posting about this? Shit that wouldn’t get out of my head that’s why. Brain dump time.

Community : as a youngling noob I have to say the EVE community is vibrant and amazing. It’s a struggle to play the actual game sometimes given the amount I spend reading blog posts, forums, dev posts, and Twitter. If it is in trouble now, what the hell was the community like before?

Bias : somewhere in the dim and distant past I picked up a degree in Medieval History and Archaeology. Yes. I have forgotten most of it. One of the few memories from studying history that doesn’t involve gigantic amounts of cheap lager was the lesson of assuming bias on the part of every writer. Bias doesn’t imply a conscious agenda but you must critically read everything. It’s all too hard to remember this given the fast paced, ephemeral nature of writing on the internet. I do it all the time. Accept bias and appreciate it, it’s at the core of any discussion. Read what you want and think what you want about it once you consider how the writer started thinking about it.

themittani.com : Accept the bias. It’s pretty good. There are some excellent articles on there, some very much so. Read with bias in mind. Competition is healthy too. It looks like the EN24 facelift was due to the launch of themittani. Mind you, I still can’t read EN24 in case I see the comments and despair for humanity. Once themittani put the RSS feed link into the page headers instead of just as a link on the page I'll stick it in my blog reading list. Actually I'm just sore that I posted the html for doing this in a comment on Jesters Trek and it got ignored. It's trivial. I've never even used Drupal and I bet I could sort it out in next to no time. All right. Enough of my I.T. based ranting.

Blogs and other EVE metagame sources : However you can link the ones you like. Share. Comment. Add your opinion. The more channels out there spreading the word, the better. Even the Google algorithm prizes links appearing on more than one site than it does on a single site. They don’t call it the “web” for nothing. The more things to argue about, the better.

Expert opinion :  I’ll look forward to the future of a crowd sourced evebloggers and/or blog pack. I understand some people were wary of its nature as a source where the positions and awards were given out by a selected few. Anyone who ever said EVE was complicated can’t complain about this. You can ignore it as you see fit but I’ll look to experience when I am starting out in something. I’ll learn then move on from there under my own power once I’ve learned. I'll come back to the source to pick up even more. You don’t need to hold fast to its recommendations but it’s a great resource for those starting out on their first steps along the EVE web. Perhaps crowd sourced it will become something else, perhaps even drowned by certain null sec concerns. Support it if you can. Support it if you know stuff about EVE.

Finally I then read of a new plan by an old maintainer of the blog pack, a fascinating idea for a tool to enhance the community further. I read it as a kind of “Podbook”, an EVE dedicated version of the likes of facebook or twitter where all the links and chat would be gloriously EVE related. It turned out that the author had something more in mind when I commented on the entry.

http://touringneweden.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/ooc-more-on-eve-bloggers-community.html

Me? I’m an idiot and bloody minded enough to stay outside such a project just because I’ve been told that it will render me irrelevant. Consider me an independent and as a famous Independant once said “This is how it is. Anybody doesn't wanna fly with me any more, this is your port of harbor. There's a lot of fine ways to die. I ain't waiting for the Alliance to choose mine.“

Gosh. That was dull. I nearly didn’t write it but the thing has been giving me writers block and I had to keep coming back. Apologies for any boredom caused and apologies if the writing is a little patchy and ill-thought out. I basically had to get this stuff out of my head as fast as I could.

Resuming normal service (once I finish listening to the Podside cast).



EVE Track of the Day

It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) - R.E.M.

Honestly, it was going to be Shiny Happy People, but this is EVE.