Pssst… Newbie Blogger Initiative

FREE FORUMS.ORG, 24 May — May is Newbie Blogger Initiaitve month and a whole collection of new and veteran MMO bloggers have been sharing tips, feedback, and inspiration in the NBI Forums. Newbies in virtual worlds, or blogs, are exciting because they can bring new ideas and fresh perspectives, but they’re also “at risk” for not finding a little perch to stick to and disappearing shortly after arrival. So the NBI peeps really rock for trying to help newcomers become part of a community!

If you’re reading this, you very likely came from the NBI, but just in case you need the link to all the MMO-NBI goodness, here it is:
• Newbie Blogger Initiative

BTW, if you want to tweet about NBI, the Twitter hash tag is:
#mmonbi

I’ve written a few posts that might be relevant, so perhaps I’ll start by mentioning them, Building Communities with Strangers isn’t really about how to blog, but it’s just a short appreciation of why I think this is such a wonderful and special space that we’re able to inhabit today:
• Building Communities with Strangers

And, Hey Stranger! iRez is always interested in new contributors! So if you poke around the blog and like what you see, you might like to contribute a guest post – give us a shout if you’re interested! The writers now are pretty much from Second Life since that’s where I “grew up,” but it’d be great to have contributions from other MMO’s too! 🙂
 

One of the choices you make with a blog is “Full Posts” vs “Excerpts.” You’ll see lots of both and peeps are passionate on both sides. A “Full Post” is just that, your home page has one long, or short, post, on top of another and you scroll through them. Or use tags, searches, etc, to find content.

With “Excerpts” you only place a small bit of a whole post on your home page, so the “home page” really becomes a Home Page, kind of like a Magazine Cover or a magazine Table Of Contents. I’m definitely an excerpt person. I might not have a chance to read your whole magazine, but I’d love to get a glance at what’s inside and head for my most interesting article first.

If you look at the top blogs, from The Huffington Post on down, they’re all Excerpt formatted Home Pages. For me excerpt home pages make the site look much more urgent and compelling. And how do you make an Excerpt? Some Themes actually do it for you, but either way, THE MORE TAG is your ticket!
• The More Tag

The next two are, hmm… “Interesting!” 🙂
I actually do love tumblr, and after all, a museum curator is pretty much a reblogger, still, I worry that ultra-reblogging can make your content pretty thin and less personal. And as for my WordPress love poem, haha, gawd, I guess I was just having a really good day or something! 😛
• Feeding at the Tumblr Trough
• How Much Does WordPress Rock?

Our virtual performance art company “VB/CO” recently performed a work “Born Again” where we found Second Life Newbie’s and welcomed them into the world. Even for us that was a wacky day! 😛 Speaking of Second Life, that’s where I’m from. I’ve seen a lot of SL blogs and also a lot of WoW blogs, since I’m not much of a gamer, I haven’t really seen blogs on other platforms, but I assume there must be plenty out there. Actually it’s funny, when Blue Mars “died,” there was a lot more discussion of it on SL blogs / tweets than on Blue Mars blogs/tweets! So I guess even though SL is smaller than WoW, there’s a sort of critical mass effect. Anyway, here’s a bunch of pix on our “performance:”
• VB30 – Born Again

Finally, here’s our “info” for NBI:
Name: Aero Bowman, Agnes Sharple, Botgirl Questi, Vaneeesa Blaylock & Xue Faith
Blog Name: I Rez, Therefore I Am
URL: iRez.me

and a couple of shout outs, I found out about NBI from Blog de la Burro, and I found about B de la B from Daniel Voyager’s blog:
• Blog de la Burro
• Daniel Voyager’s Blog

When I started 3 years ago I almost made a wiki instead. I wanted to post documentation of performance artworks from virtual worlds, and I thought a wiki or a blog might each work pretty well. I flipped a coin, and became a blogger.

 
 

 
I   R E Z   T H E R E F O R E   I   A M   –   B L O G   H I S T O R Y

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2009 Apr 18 – VB01 – Girl Next Door
2009 Apr 22 – I Rez Therefore I Am launched on Blogger
2010 Apr-Jun-ish – posting on Avatars United
2010 Jun 30 – I Rez Therefore I Am on WordPress.com
                            Theme: DePo Masthead by Automattic
                            Domain: Vaneeesa.com
2011 Jul 06 – Theme: Delicious Magazine by Woo Themes
2012 May 10 – Domain: iRez.me
 
 

I loved our Blogger blog back in April 09, but it feels like we’ve come so far since then, both in content and in platform and design.

Thanks to all the NBI Advice-Giverers and all the Advice-Receiverers! I think MMO Worlds are such amazing places and I’m glad everyone’s banded together to try to build community – that’s as good as it gets! 🙂

— Vaneeesa