Monday, March 7, 2011

The OSR Blog Graveyard

For my blogometric exercises I need to track blogs by following them on blogger.com. Unfortunately blogger.com only allows me to follow a maximum of 300 blogs. I have now maxed out this number. In order for me to keep track of new and interesting blogs that pop up, I am now forced to unfollow blogs that are dead or inactive.

I combed my list for blogs that are either DEAD, EMPTY, or INACTIVE (i.e. no posts for ~2 months or more). Here I present a list of these 59 blogs. I will unfollow and stop tracking all DEAD and EMPTY blogs, and all blogs that have been inactive for four or more months. If you own one of these blogs and care, feel free to drop me a note telling me that you intend to revive your blog in the near future, and I will gladly keep tracking it for my blogometrics posts.


Links to all blogs that have content, even if they are inactive, will remain on my master blog list.

Blog
Status
Months Inactive
GONE

GONE

GONE

GONE

GONE

GONE

EMPTY

EMPTY

INACTIVE
2
INACTIVE
5
INACTIVE
2
INACTIVE
2
INACTIVE
3
INACTIVE
3
INACTIVE
3
INACTIVE
7
INACTIVE
2
INACTIVE
7
INACTIVE
9
INACTIVE
7
INACTIVE
8
INACTIVE
2
INACTIVE
4
INACTIVE
2
INACTIVE
11
INACTIVE
8
INACTIVE
6
INACTIVE
3
INACTIVE
4
INACTIVE
6
INACTIVE
2
INACTIVE
4
INACTIVE
6
INACTIVE
5
INACTIVE
7
INACTIVE
6
INACTIVE
3
INACTIVE
2
INACTIVE
2
INACTIVE
4
INACTIVE
5
INACTIVE
5
INACTIVE
5
INACTIVE
4
INACTIVE
3
INACTIVE
9
INACTIVE
5
INACTIVE
6
INACTIVE
4
INACTIVE
4
INACTIVE
3
INACTIVE
3
INACTIVE
9
INACTIVE
4
INACTIVE
6
INACTIVE
2
INACTIVE
5
INACTIVE
5
INACTIVE
6

23 comments:

  1. Yeah that's really a good move! I can confirm that GAME SNOB and THE DOOMED WASTELANDS are not going to return.

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  2. Not. . .dead. . . yet . . .must. . . reach . . .potion. . .of . . .healing. . .If only. . .could. . . reach. . . utility belt

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  3. I think many people start a blog, going strong for a month or two, and then run out of steam. Your list definitely supports this idea. Blogging on a regular basis is like a mini-job sometimes, unless you have a project that you are working on and describing in your blog updates.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Blogging on a regular basis is like a mini-job sometimes

    Yeah - even though maybe 1/5 of the OSR blogs look like they have died, there are still ~200 of them that are alive. This amazes me.

    Like others have pointed out, the OSR blogosphere is pumping out about a Dragon Magazine worth of material every day or two.

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  5. Some old faves here too. I miss "Back in '81". The experiences he described have often paralleled my own.

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  6. I have mixed emotions about this but, allow me to assist with your research. Here's one that is also m.i.a. Xeveninti, six months out of action. The author, Mark, is actually the guy would introduced me to the osr blog-o-wonder.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Some of these blogs had, may have had, interesting insights and house rules. How do we as a community preserve them? Should we even try?

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  8. I asked the writer of it, and "Warning - Mutagenic Substance" is going to be coming back up soon.

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  9. It's too bad but on the other hand, I think it's good to weed out the inactive blogs.

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  10. I clear out my blog roll every couple of months. My criteria is a season. So three months and you're out. Gotta do it, otherwise it gets too cluttered.

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  11. I have some comments:

    1.) Entirely too much of that dragon magazine's worth of material is equivalent to forum letters, rather than articles. I am fairly frustrated during my daily blog roll review at the amount of posts that are nothing more than opinion pieces on "what OSR means" and the absurd "OSR is dead" other rubbish. I'm particularly miffed when people actually draw attention to the hub-bub. I would write a blog post about it, but that would just be contributing to the problem, natch. I'll stick with content generation.

    2.) You can create a secondary google account? This will allow you to track up to 300 blogs on each account. Will this solution work for you? You could even set up the second account to only check the inactive blogs. (because sometimes they become active again with gold, like Sham's grog 'n blog)

    3.) Thank you for your work and contributions to the community. I got a number of followers (which isn't important) exposing a lot of new people to my generated material (which is) due to your call out on the homepage. Thanks.

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  12. Thanks for reminding me about my blog. I've restarted it and hope to post on it more often.

    ReplyDelete
  13. I'm with -C from Hack & Slash. Even worse than the navel-gazing though is the edition warriors. Keep to the content generation and talking about how awesome our games are (with examples of play, not with navel-gazing) instead of how un-awesome something is.

    But then again, I've been described as a traitor to the OSR before.

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  14. Dyson and -C sum up my thoughts as well. IMO, one's goal shouldn't be to always pay the Joesky tax, but never to be obligated to do so.

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  15. The Dragon's Eye will be revived at some point but if you wish to go ahead and drop it for right now that's fine.

    I'll re-submit it or its successor when the time is right.

    And yes, many thanks for the job you're doing here. It is a great idea for the community and I appreciate the kind of work that goes into this.

    Also, as for OSR blogs-there are A LOT more than 200..I'm redoing my aggregator and have well over 300 confirmed and tracked and at least another 200 to go through and I feel I'm just scratching the surface.

    This scene is growing like wildfire :)

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  16. Spellcard and Threads of Adventure are on temporary hiatus until I through fixing some analytics. I've been tweaking format in the meanwhile.

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  17. I put up a few posts, in good faith that there are more on the way. ;)

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  18. I don't mean to hijack the thread, but...

    I've seen the phrase "pay the Joesky tax" pop up more than once in the last few days.

    What does it mean? (Google wasn't helpful.)

    ReplyDelete
  19. I've seen the phrase "pay the Joesky tax" pop up more than once in the last few days.

    What does it mean?


    Joesky Tax = every blog post should have some creative gaming content.

    However, as THIS POST shows, readers don't care about this.

    ReplyDelete
  20. I just want to let you know that I have started up again at the XP Experience. Please do not "fire" me.

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  21. Funny how, after you mentioned how these blogs are "dead"... that suddenly posts started showing up on them...

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  22. I don't think it's funny. Sometimes all there has to be is a reminder that what you did was appreciated. Boom - creative juices flowing.
    I myself often thought: Na, that's not good enough, but, hey, even if it's crappy content, at least somebody could be inspired to make it better. So... of to post something...

    ReplyDelete

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