Sunday, January 27, 2008

Blog Networks

Many businesses not only use blogs to create goodwill among customers and potential customers, many specialized websites run their own blogging services.

IGN.com, a video game and entertainment website owned by News Corp. has a blogging site called Club.ign.com. It's a unique network that hosts blogs written by IGN editors, IGN users, and game developers.

The blogs of IGN editors generally serve the purpose of the Microsoft blogs discussed in Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. They write about what do at their jobs, places they visit, events they take part in, etc. An example is the blog of Matt-IGN.

The blogs of game developers try to illuminate the process of game development, allow consumers to get to know the people behind the games, and, of course, promote their games. As I'm writing this, the most popular developer blog is Bethesda Softworks'. Bethesda is the DC-area company behind the Elder Scrolls games and the upcoming Fallout 3. Recent posts include a profile of developer Erik Deitrick, and an introduction by the Executive Producer of Fallout 3.

Most blog networks are either open and content free like Blogger or corporate like Weblogs Inc. (Engadget, Cinematical, TV Squad). Club.ign.com has a unique place in all of this. It publishes its own corporate-backed content, allows other companies to publish on it, and even allows individual users to do so.

2 comments:

Jessica said...

just testing

Steph said...

I really liked your explination of how the gaming sites use bloggers to help them with their games. I also think it's a really good idea for companies (espeically computer and video game companies) to get feedback from their consumers.

I know that when I played Halo and Halo 2 there were a bunch of different things that bothered me. In Halo 3 I found they fixed a lot of those things, making the game much more fun and intereting. I'm not sure if they devolped Halo 3 by bloggers, but i am sure that Blogs and user feedback did factor into the game somehow