Summary, Background, Introduction BLAH BLAH
Unless you’ve been living under a freakin rock, you’ve heard many bloggers talk recently about the tension inherent in blogging and also being part of a guild.
See: Cassandri’s musings before this became a big freakin deal, Tam’s post that started it all and his follow up, Larisa on the issue, Indecent Healer, Anea, Matticus, Ophelie, and probably more than a few others whose posts I can’t seem to locate at the moment.
Noisy Rogue then suggested an all-blogger guild. Tam and Miss Medicina obliged by setting up the EU and US versions respectively. Well it’s not really all-blogger. It’s all bloggers and our little groupies. I mean beloved readership.
On Anonymity
Short-short version. I don’t want to out myself on this blog not because my guildies might find the blog, but because the world might find my guild. The guild simply does not need that sort of attention when I am using examples from it to illustrate larger points.
I thought I was being a little overly cautious and weird scrubbing my name and guild name from every photo… right until WoW.com linked here yesterday. My site went from 200ish loyal readers to 4000 tourists. I’d probably feel comfortable sharing real details with my regular readers, mostly bloggers, mostly people I know in some way. But not the tourists.
Are bloggers “better people” than the tourists? Stay tuned…
The All Blogger Guild
Besides our love for writing, I think bloggers and people who read blogs have a lot in common.
First of all, in order to write, we have to be articulate. Can you imagine never hearing leet in guild chat. Like EVER? Everyone speaking in complete sentences. It’s giving me goosebumps just thinking about the discourse.
Second, we all research. We want to know how to play our classes as well as we can. And if we’re doing something wrong, we want to know about it. In an all-blogsphere guild you wouldn’t have the moron at 80 with 71 points in 1 tree, or the DK with spellpower plate. Would NEVER happen.
However, if we made the all-bloggy guild our main guild, our blogs would suffer for it. The interesting thing about reading blogs right now is hearing how like-minded people deal with different situations. Some of us are in raiding guilds, some of us are more advanced than others. Our guilds have different leadership structures and loot systems. Our diverse experiences help us give each other advice from different perspectives. If we are having a uniform in-game experience, the blogsphere suffers because there will be patches of experience that none of us have.
I envy you your anonymity, I really do. But you encapsulated precisely what I was trying to achieve in this sentence:
I don’t want to out myself on this blog not because my guildies might find the blog, but because the world might find my guild.
I would really love to protect any guild I join from, yes, the world. But it doesn't seem like I can.
Also – the thing about the blogging communities guild was that it's *most assuredly not* meant to replace any other guild. It's a meeting space, that's all. I often roll alts on other servers to talk to other bloggers – I mean just "hello, how are you, loved this post" kind of stuff. And then it thought, well, why have 10 alts on different servers just for saying hello: let's all do it together.
Yeah, that's how I'm regarding SAN- a place to go to, virtually speaking, have a beer and a lot of chitchat with the like-minded. I adore my guild and will never leave it for another just because it happens to be chattier, but it WAS awfully nice to shed the pressures of organizing the raid schedule and roster, collecting consumables, and visiting @3%ing elders for an hour or so.
It's true. Everything is in complete sentences. And people are talking just to talk.
It's amazing sitting in guild chat and having witty, clever, FULL SENTENCED conversations with so many other people. Granted, there are still typos, and spelling errors on occasion and all those normal human things – but you just know that all these folks are genuinely intelligent people.
WITH A SENSE OF HUMOR.
When I first started writing I didn't mention my characters names, I didn't feel it was important. The longer I write the more I find people like to know who you are, what you are doing.
The thing is, you always have to realize people you write about may see it. You have to keep that in mind, it's not a secret diary tucked under a mattress, it's online in a blog.
Thank you for the trackback – and I look forward to chatting with you in our blogging guild over at Argent Dawn. Although, I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I actually never studied the written word seriously and have no idea what Single Abstract Noun even means
I've never worried about putting my guild under scrutiny – even under the scrutiny of the (often) mean WoW.com readers. The raiding community on our server is really a pretty small world – eventually you realise that all your guild members have been in, or have ties to, all the other guilds around us. And on our server, well, players already have an opinion of my guild regardless of what I write.
If you open them up to an even bigger audience of all players/raiders on all realms… well… I doubt we're in the top 1000 guilds. So we're small peanuts. Why bother forming an opinion?
As an author, and a reader, the opinions that I form of other guilds are purely based on what the blogger writes about. I know which blogs I read that are similarly progressed – because the blogger is writing about experiences with boss X or Y. For example, I know that Keeva (TreeBarkJacket) has more raiding experience than Lathere (HotsandDots), presumably her guild is more skilled/successful, because she had been blogging about fights we've yet to experience.
Beyond that, it doesn't colour my opinion of the blogger or their guild. It's just something you know in the back of your head while you're reading. In the same way that I know that Tamarind writes about weird Horde stuff and NPCs that I've never experienced – because he (was) a Blood Elf Priest.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think your readers will be as tough on your guild as you might think.
I tend not to directly link because unless I'm very much mistaken, the few dedicated people who actually read my blog aren't reading it for info about them.
I love those guys and gals but it's not really about them unless there's something that really merits it.
I must say that as an officer I do get tasty gossip and I think thats exactly the problem we have with blogging about guilds. The only really interesting/shocking thing will be drama which conversely you can't always discuss.
I guess it's different with me, since everyone seems to know who I am. I started the blog as a tribute to the following I developed while online so I guess the anonymity was never there in the first place. I respect what all of you do and I enjoy hearing about it, but from the other side it is not as bad as you may think it is.
Little by little word has leaked out about my blog in the guild. It's certainly made me feel the need to censor a bit more. And created writer's block. It's been a long week in the guild and I can't rant!