Blogging Vs Communities

I guess I have a bit to say before I get on to what I created this blog for...

One thing I don't like much about Blogs is they force focus to the individual at the expense of community.  I much prefer sites like BoardGameGeek which provide a Community around the Boardgaming hobby.

Lately on BoardGameGeek I've noticed something that bugs me.  More and more posts are created with one sentence: "I wrote up a review about SomeNewHotGame over on my blog.  You can check it out here".  I personally do not like this because it pulls the reader out of the Community and into a terminal endpoint of a website.  When readers follow this path they then end up commenting on the person's blog site and not within the framework of the community.  This means as a member of the BoardGameGeek community I may not find the well-written comments left by a fellow game enthusiast because he/she left them on another site.  I also cannot use the Community search feature to find contents of an article that might otherwise interest me.  Ultimately this dilutes the content within that Community, which is something I don't like to see.

So here is my solemn pledge to members of the Hobby.  I will not attempt to make this very content-anemic blog an endpoint for you.  If I feel what I post here has enough substance to warrant being read by the gaming community then I will post the material on BoardGameGeek.com or appropriate site.

I will also not write an article here and then go post a link on a forum site just to drive traffic back to my backwater gaming blog.

To those of you who link your blogs from a Community forum site.  I'll follow your links and I'll read your articles.  Several of you posted very well-written and interesting articles that I enjoyed reading.  Several of you created micro-communities of your own, which I think is healthy.  You have every right to do what you do.  I would much rather have you write lots of content and post it on individual Blog endpoints than not write at all.  So please, keep writing, but maybe include a searchable portion of the content in your forum post with a link to the blog for more detail.

-Verm