OOC: More on the Eve bloggers community project

You're an Eve blogger. You have your own blog, probably using blogspot or wordpress. But you're a blog island amongst a collection of islands, with all of them struggling to be noticed amongst the other islands. It's competitive out there!

Or you're thinking about becoming an Eve blogger. You have a story to tell, but you're just not so sure about these blogs. They look like a lot of hard work! So much effort to set up a blog when all you want to do is write your story! So you haven't done anything about it yet, because it seems like more trouble than what it's worth.

I'm building something for you. It doesn't matter if you already have a blog, or you're thinking of getting one. What I'm building is exactly what you're looking for, that will allow you to start writing as soon as you've signed up.

These are the features that are already in the development stage:

• a single domain for the entire blogging community (those that sign up, of course)
• automatic blog setup based on signup and registration details
• your own blog URL based as a subdomain of the community site
• import all your blog posts and images from your old blog (if you have one)
• extensive profile options that allow you to define what others can see about you 
• a ratings system for posts and articles, allowing the most popular to rise to the surface for longer periods of time
•  make new friends and keep up to date with their activities
• create or join groups based on topics of interest
• create a group forum, or join other group or community forums
• activity streams that allow you to view your personal, groups or community activity, allowing you to engage in discussions related to the activity of other members - whether that's on their own blog posts, their personal updates, or their group and community forum entries - all from the one location
• extensive activity notification options

This project, being developed as you're reading this, will create a single Eve Online blogging community. Not multiple and separate blogs, but a single community site dedicated to showcasing all of its members posts and articles.

The community's 'home' page will allow access to all the blog posts written by its members, including access to the author's profile where their community activity can be seen, including their personal updates or forum activity.

The 'activity' page will stream all community activity, including new posts, personal updates, or forum activity.

Each member's personal URL will be their own personal 'blog', showcasing their posts and their community activity. Every member will have their own activity stream, allowing them to see new comments added to their posts, or to their updates or forum activities.

Private messaging will allow private in-site communication with other members, including to multiple members.

This project will bring together Eve bloggers into a single community. A united community, all writing their own individual stories and articles via a single community site, their activity promoting the Eve blogging community as a whole, while actively engaging with and supporting other members via discussions on posts and in forums.

I can tell you that I'm really excited to be developing this. I'm hoping you will be excited to be part of it. It has the potential to be big. Really big. But for this (r)evolutionary 'Eve blogging community' to succeed, it needs Eve bloggers. It needs current bloggers to support it, so that new bloggers are inspired to be part of it.

Since 2009 I've had a vision of a united Eve Online blogging community. I still have that vision today, and it's why I'm working towards building this site.  I think Eve bloggers and Eve Online itself can benefit greatly from a single, tight-knit community of Eve bloggers.

Multiple, independent blogs calling themselves a community and using blogrolls and blog rings is really old fashioned. This once-popular method of trying to create a community of individual blogs seems so old-fashioned now, and I believe its' time is over.

If we're going to step forward into the future, we really need to choose to do it as a community.

I know there's going to be quite a few current bloggers who are so ingrained into being independent that they're not going to support this with their involvement, but I have to ask - if you really want a community that's going to take us into the next few years, why wouldn't you get involved in helping to build it?

I can't do it alone, and I don't want to. I can't build a community by myself - that's not what a community is about. I need prominent Eve bloggers - all of them! - to get involved, to move away from their old-fashioned, independent blogs and set up a presence for themselves in this new community site.

Just remember - you'll be able to import all your old blog posts and images, and you can still maintain an independent URL with the subdomain of your choice. For example, you might have 'myeveblog.blogspot.com' and you can still maintain that as 'myeveblog.communitysite.net', with all your old content still accessible. You can even do a redirect from your old blog URL to your new one, so that there's no interruption and you can slowly transition visitors across. Even RSS feed URLs can be redirected without issues.

All 'blogs', however, will be subdomains of the main community site, to promote the community. Once it's well established, I will probably allow integration of custom domains to be integrated into the community site, so that members can have www.mydomain.com while still using the communitysite.net features as their backend. But that will be a feature enabled down the road.

It's a community site, and so it's going to have a very active presence which is likely to require various levels of support. There will be issues with new memberships, with profile and blog setups, or with various site functionality. All issues will need to be resolved in a timely manner. There will need to be moderators of the forums, even administrators of the site to help out with support issues.

I'm considering how support requests can be achieved with in-game ISK payments instead of real money, allowing a free community to be supported with in-game payments. That's yet to be worked out, and is only an idea at this stage. I don't want people to think, "Why should I pay real money for my membership or support needs, when I can get it for free via blogspot or wordpress?" But at the same time, I want there to be some kind of reward for members providing support.

Does anyone have any thoughts or feedback on anything I've talked about in this post above? Please add it to a comment below. Your participation and your feedback is valuable.

Also, this community is going to be built. It's not a thought, it's not a whim, it's a project already in development with many of the above features already in place. I've already chosen the domain, as well as the community catch phrase, and I think it's going to be awesome!

But for that reason, I don't want negative feedback. Anyone with any negative feedback or stupid criticism will have their comments deleted. I want community support to help make this work, and anything that's not helpful towards that end will be deleted and disregarded.

If you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem.

Thank you for your support - let's make this work!