Persistence and blogs

I had to clean up my Google Reader and remove a bunch of MMO blogs that have gone inactive, or downright declared they were closing down. There have been some news stories in the MMO blogosphere about even big blogs, like Resto4Life and Big Red Kitty for WoW, and Waaagh! for WAR, closing down. Although we write about persistent worlds, our blogs aren't necessarily persistent. Blogs like mine that are over 5 years old are actually quite rare.

I have no plans to stop blogging, but I'm not handing out guarantees that this blog will be around forever. And, maybe more importantly, there is even less guarantee that I'll keep writing things you are interested in. Because our interests might drift apart. I always insist that this is not a World of Warcraft blog, it is a MMORPG blog of a guy who happens to play WoW since 2004, on and off. If you move on to play Darkfall, and I develop an unexpected passion for Hello Kitty Online, it is likely that our interests would overlap less.

It is very difficult to write every day about something you aren't passionate about, so I totally understand all these blogs shutting down. Especially when they dedicated their blog to a particular game or even class. I've been passionate about games for over 30 years now, so I think I'll remain interested in games for a very long time to come. Thus there is a good chance that I can keep up the blog with it's current subject matter for years to come.

One thing that struck me about blogging is the way how your blog URL acquires a value of its own, due to the way search engines and Google page ranks work. If I stopped blogging here tomorrow, but opened Dlobot's MMORPG blog on a new URL, writing there exactly what I'd normally write here, it would take months, if not years, before the new blog would get the number of daily visitors and feed readers that this blog is getting now. Or if I kept this URL and completely changed it's subject to "Tobold's Blog on painting garden gnomes", I could instantly get the number one spot on Google among all garden gnome painting blogs. In short, Google attaches a page rank, and thus value, to my blog URL, not to my person or the actual content of my blog. Well, let's hope that you are interested in painting garden gnomes. :)