Why blog?

If you've been idly considering starting a blog this month is a good time to put your toes in the water and see if you like it.

Blogging is about getting your opinion out there. For some of the best bloggers it goes beyond opinion and towards journalism where the writer is sourcing his information and checking financials etc: this guy is Eve's best exponent of that style at the moment.

Blogging has advantages over other forms of expression.

- Control. This is my blog, I control what appears here, I can publish guest articles from other writers, I can delete comments I don't like, etc.

- Community. Typically other bloggers will make up a lot of your active community. All blogs have a majority of readers who quietly absorb the articles and never comment. The people that interact with you tend to be other bloggers. For instance Ancient Gaming Noob and Rixx Javix, two of the most admired Eve bloggers commented on my last post. We're a community and in some ways quite like-minded.

- Archiving. By google's grace these blogs endure indefinitely. I can go back to my articles from about 10 years ago when I started blogging. That's probably more enduring than if I saved them to a hard drive unless I maintained a collection of detachable drives or something. In an ephemeral age these free blog platforms are very persistent and it's very nice to be able to look back on what I wrote years ago. (And how right I was! ;) )

- A place to start. It's very easy now to write for the semi-professional Eve sites like INN or CZ. But if you're new it might be nice to blog first, find your writing style, then publish on a site that will draw a wider audience but potentially more criticism.

- A diary. Blogging has its origins as online diaries, the word literally comes from "web log." Diarising your game activites helps you keep organised and abreast of activities and decisions. It can be particularly useful for people whose actions impact other people to be able to go back and check things you have decided before.

- CV/Resume item. If your cv is very light you could put your blogging on there. Be sure it's a blog you're happy for employers to look at (eg no NSFW stuff) and that establishing yourself as an Eve nerd may be helpful to your application. (It probably does for a job in the games industry, it probably doesn't for a bar job). Just bear in mind that to most employers writing about a video game makes you a less interesting person, not a more interesting one.

How do you start?

Think of it like a diary but maybe a bit more freeform. Any time you're stuck "today I did this..." is a usually a good blog article. You can also post whacky armchair game design ideas or soapbox rants. The Blaugust requirement to blog daily is a good starting point because your writing will get better the more you do of it.

Frequent regular blogging is a hallmark of many of the most successful bloggers. People like Ancient Gaming Noob and (historically) Gevlon and Jester publish(-ed) pretty much daily.

Some people use blogs to produce very infrequent but extremely expert articles such as Suitonia and Capri

Promote your blog by commenting on other blogger's articles and politely mentioning you have just started a blog. Don't be too pushy, I'd probably delete a comment that just pimped a blog without any interest in commenting on what I was writing about but I do look at commenters who take an interest in what I write.

There's a Eve blog sites collator, get yourself on that. There's also the My Eve section of CCP's official Eve forums.

You can also post your blog article as a link on /r/eve although you might get some rather brutal feedback.