Day 3 of the RPGbloggers network and already things have been, shall we say, dynamic.

Since I self-appointed myself the community voice of this little project, I thought I’d give you an update.

This nerd project, an initial idea by the Critical-Hits guys and backed by a handful of eager bloggers, was met with such astounding success that it grew past our expectations in mere hours.  From 7 blogs at opening it grew to 30 until Dave collapsed on his bed and had to recuperate and focus on actual paying work.

Then, after a few hiccups with website feeds and humongous graphics exploding on the site’s front page, the site inexplicably crashed for many hours.  Was it traffic, a badly parsed feed, or some CSS loop gone mad?  We don’t know yet and we’re investigating.

All this around a fan-based unfinanced project whose philosophy and vision is probably ahead of our technical readiness to pull it off (although I must give Graham and Dave all the credit here to have hacked things to this level in such a short time).

As with all rapidly growing projects, some opportunities for improvement showed up fast .  We’re all painfully aware of the limited usability of having a gazzillion feed over a far wider range of subject than the average RPG reader cares about.

People have voiced concern over the filtration of RPG content, the sheer number of posts appearing on a daily basis, the possible drowning of one’s post in the page’s rapidly updating content and a perceived dilution of quality vs quantity.

We (I mean the little core group of people supporting/leading this initiative) tend to share similar concerns and have been discussing solutions.

Here’s a rundown of the short/mid term solutions we are entertaining to make the network easier to use.

First, let me be absolutely crystal clear that there is no plan to cull the current number of blog members (and we plan to start adding new blogs as soon as we master some technical issues).  I don’t think we have a quality issue so much as an organization of feeds challenge.

Secondly, we plan to implement a stronger categorization of incoming feeds (with the help of member bloggers) so that posts will appear in subject-specific sub feeds. Readers will be able to use tabs (or a similar mechanism) to see (and subscribe to) feeds on subjects they care about.

Third, we plan to have some site-exclusive featured posts that will, among other things,  present periodic  ‘best of’  from the site’s feeds, a sort of digest of what’s going on in the RPG blogshere.

Fourth, we’ll draft a ‘Good neighbors’ quality charter for the members to adhere to in terms of proper tagging/categorizing of posts, that suggest workarounds for the unavoidable Echo Chamber effects (i,e. all bloggers talking about the same thing at the same time) and foster community building behavior.

Finally, we’ll create a style guide to help bloggers building cool titles and great excerpts to look their best on the site’s page.

That’s about it for the near-term stuf.  It’s going to be a lot of work, but we all want this to be a site that people will enjoy using.

That being said, I’ve been surfing on many of the network’s sites and I must say that comments have picked up on many of them.  The intended cross-pollination of readership has worked beyond our expectations!  People have discovered new blogs and are commenting on them.

This is what the network is all about.  Later, it will probably be more, but for now I see it as a mixer party where people from different communities mingle and get to know each other.

Then we’ll take out the spiked Punchbowl and get this party really started.

On a last note, some potential members have raised concerns over loss of RSS subscribers and possible impact in advertising revenues of individual blogs.  While I still find the possibility of making significant amounts of money in the RPG blog niche debatable, this is a genuine concern.

Please note that the following is my personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the views of rest of the network’s members.

There currently is one good ‘ad campaign’ going around, The Wizards of the Coast Banner ads, and I predict more will come.  While this campaign seems to be focused on RSS feeds (i.e you need to have reached a certain RSS subscription point, and know the appropriate people to get it), I Intend to lobby hard for advertisers to explore different ways of gauging a website’s worth for advertisement.  RSS feeds subscription can be easily manipulated (i.e. having multiple subs per reader) once a blog reaches a certain point and I’m starting to think that’s not such a good idea.

I’ll keep you posted.

For now, enjoy the network and know that keep on getting better and better…

…then some mega corporation will buy us off for eleventy gazzilion dollars.

Yeah right.