RIT student Jay Bibby's jay is games weblog
is an impressive "thinking person's source" on video games and game
design. I like almost every single game Jay blogs about (the vast
majority are playable online for free), and his mini-reviews are
invariably well-articulated and insightful, efficiently distilling
what's innovative or outstanding about the game under review. Even if
you're no big fan of games, you should check it out.
Jay has been at it for a year and a half - I'm kicking myself for not
finding out about it earlier. Thank goodness, the archives are all
there.
(By the way, if, like me, you're attracted to simplicity and elegance in game design, you must try out itoneko, which I found via Jay. Awesome.)
Though I use inbound links
all the time to gauge interest and know what others have framed such or
such piece of writing, I don't believe inbound link lookup is generally
widespread yet. But it is bound to happen sooner or later. Egosurfing
will be the first driver, and group-forming ("let's see... who else cares about the issues discussed in this article?") may be the second.
Michael Lenczner may have kickstarted a new behavioral trend among bloggers!
Simply put, it consists in using the del.icio.us linklogging system to
log comments after you've left them, by bookmarking the pages you've commented on.
This is obviously handy as a personal trail of places you've been,
which makes it easy for you to revisit comment threads you're participating in. In
addition, it can be of use to others (1) as a way of being aware of
things you found interesting enough to comment on, and (2) as a way of
verifying that you were indeed the person who posted such-or-such
comment under your name.
A few points worth noticing:
Universal solvent property.
Though blogging systems and commenting modalities vary, all permalinks
are built upon the same system - good old HTTP links. And del.icio.us
works with good old HTTP links, so this method works everywhere,
including forums where some form of permalink exists.
Enabling commentlogging in a way that requires coordination with all
the different comment systems would be much more trouble. (Though it
could enable complete automation of the process and eliminate the "post
to del.icio.us" action that is required each time on the part
of the commentlogger).
Expanding feedspace to decentralized writers.
This method enables some of those people who leave worthy and witty comments
all over the place but don't (or hardly) maintain a blog to provide a webfeed
of their writing so their fans can follow them around as easily as we follow bloggers.
Doubling as a dynamic blogroll. Blogrolls
often ossify over time, no longer reflecting the places you actually
pay regular visits to. (I know mine suffers from this problem.) If you
display your commentlog, as Michael does, in your blog's sidebar, it could complement or replace the blogroll as a way of signaling the good places
out there.
