Raph’s Website » The MMO blogosphere map

The MMO blogosphere map

December 9th, 2006 (Visited 5733 times) Tags:

Click to get a blown-up version with blog names.

Inspired by Jeff Freeman’s list of the top 100 blogs for MMO gamers, I used TouchGraphGoogle to build a map of the immediate vicinity of the MMO gaming blogosphere.

Method: I set the depth fairly low, and also set the minimum inbound links at 5 so that I started with only blogs that have fair amount of other blogs pointing to them. I used here, Zen of Design, Broken Toys, and Psychochild as immediate starting nodes. Then as new nodes appeared, I kept going outwards until they were no longer relevant to MMOs.

Lots of gaming news sites appeared, as did actual game sites and developers. I dropped those from the map as they appeared. If a site wasn’t predominantly “bloggy” I tended to drop it, with the exception of the few remaining all-MMO forum sites. A large chunk of map went away when I dropped links to Joel Spolsky and Lawrence Lessig even though they were “in the orbit” so to speak. Leaving out news blogs like Kotaku and Joystiq cleaned up the graph immensely — just assume that most of the game-centric sites linked to them.

Of interest is the way that the graph quickly gets into game studies as you head northeast. Northwest is where it would link to the rest of the techie web; Many to Many is a social software site, for example, and that’s where Joel on Software, Lessig, and so on lived before I zapped them. Southwest is clearly player land, and devs occupy the center.

A notable feature is the way that the first few Second Life blogs to pop up are clearly off to the side, not tied into the main MMO blog world. They connect via TerraNova, of course. I didn’t dig deeply into the SL side of the family — most likely, it would wrap around to the techie stuff that used to be in the northwest.

It’s clear that finding the “center” of the MMO blogosphere would be impossible. There’s a ton of sites that fell below the minimum # of links threshold.And I bet if Brian, Scott, Damion & I all joined forces for a group blog, we could maybe earn a whole dollar a month off AdSense.

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MMODIG - Massively Multiplayer Online Dysfunctionaly Interactive Games » Ohhhh perty. wrote on December 9th, 2006 at 3:10 am:

[...] Blatantly stealing the above shiny from Raphsipoo, who stole the idea from Jeff “I broke my Blog” Freeman who probably stole the idea from somewhere else as well. [...]

Mapping MMOG Reality at MMOG Nation wrote on December 9th, 2006 at 4:44 pm:

[...] Inspired by Jeff’s work the other day, you might be interested to see Raph’s slightly more readable map on the same topic. He trimmed this one way back to keep readability high, so I’m not even on the edges of this one. It was quite interesting to see the different ‘regions’ of the MMOGosphere continent, with the players to the south and the academics to the north, and those creepy SL people thankfully off on their own little island. [...]

rascunho » Seção de dados do blog » links for 2006-12-10 wrote on December 10th, 2006 at 12:25 pm:

[...] Raph’s Website » The MMO blogosphere map Inspired by Jeff Freeman’s list of the top 100 blogs for MMO gamers, I used TouchGraphGoogle to build a map of the immediate vicinity of the MMO gaming blogosphere. (tags: http://www.raphkoster.com 2006 touchgraph blog_post mmog imagem) [...]

In the Grid wrote on December 13th, 2006 at 1:26 pm:

MMOs versus MMORPGs: If I’m having fun, is it a game?…

Today, a personal essay inspired by recent entries in the SLogosphere, as we all patiently waiting for this week’s client update to finally finish. The topic: Massively Multiuser Online (MMO) environments such as Second Life, versus MMORPGs that inclu…

VirginWorlds.com - Exploring Massively Multiplayer Games wrote on March 29th, 2007 at 10:52 am:

Last week the blogosphere went crazy posting diagrams of linkage and stats from bloglines. I felt like most of those methods of examining the community and the relative popularity of various MMO blogs to be somewhat flawed. This one probably is too… what I did is searched Google for the url (not

MMODump.com » The SL cultural gap wrote on April 5th, 2007 at 12:01 pm:

[...] the discussion of the blogosphere graph, I pointed out neighborhoods that are webbed together but nonetheless clearly visible. You can [...]

5 Things You Don’t Know About Me - Amber Night wrote on April 22nd, 2007 at 1:20 am:

[...] supposed to spread the meme, staph-like, across the intertubes. (You just know Raph's going to make a cloud thing when it's all said and done.) Brian, Ken, Dragon, Krones, and Tipa: In accordance [...]

MMOG Map at MMOG Nation wrote on May 2nd, 2007 at 8:19 pm:

[...] examined the three good looks at the mmogblogosphere, but only as a [...]

unbeliever said on December 9th, 2006 at 3:19 am:

oooh, perty, but did you have to make terra nova the center of the universe?

Darniaq said on December 9th, 2006 at 9:03 am:

Ironic timing that I appear on that chart

Nice work though. I’ve always loved plots like this, as a visual person.

Jason Pettus said on December 9th, 2006 at 9:08 am:

“I didn’t dig deeply into the SL side of the family…”

I would love to see you do such a thing, actually, to see whether the SLogosphere ends up connecting more or not with the rest of the MMO blog universe. I’ve only been immersed in MMOs for less than a year now, but I’ve noticed something that your current graphic above seems to support; that Second Life stands far and away from the rest of the MMO industry, both in the eyes of players and the tech people involved. For example, I’ve been by a couple of these larger publications that purport to cover a wide range of MMO subjects; but I’ve noticed that most tend not to consider SL a subject they should be covering at all, but rather concentrating on teenage videogame-style MMOs.

The founders of SL, of course, have famously insisted all this time that it is not a ‘game;’ I’m curious if your graphic above is proof that the rest of the industry is now acknowledging this, or if we would actually see a lot more connections between SL and the rest of the MMO blogosphere if the chart was grown a little more. In any case, it’s fascinating — thanks for posting it! –Miller Copeland (SL), “In The Grid”

Wagner James Au said on December 9th, 2006 at 10:14 am:

Very cool stuff! Though ack, how’d the old skool, Linden-sponsored NWN blog get in there?

Raph said on December 9th, 2006 at 11:52 am:

Unbeliever: I didn’t do the arranging; that’s where the mapping app puts it automatically. You can go into a manual arranging mode, though.

Jason: The tool is linked above, so give it a try! (be sure to download the latest JVM if you are having trouble). I do recommend you not try going too deep on links, though, and set a high threshold for importance for the blogs. Otherwise, you spend a lot of time pruning.

James: Apparently, there are still plenty of links to it.

Evangolis said on December 9th, 2006 at 1:45 pm:

I feel the need to ask for more, since I am an MMO player.

Could you do it as a 3 dimensional graph that rotates and zooms? And could you make a time sequenced version that traces the evolution of sites from, say 1995? And can I have a pony, and please bring back pre-casting, since I never got to?

Otherwise, it’s perfect.

Michael Chui said on December 9th, 2006 at 2:08 pm:

This does explain why Terra Nova is the only place people ask for more SL. It’s also interesting how the serious games movement is also a bit of an outlier, primarily connected to the academics who are pushing it.

Psychochild said on December 9th, 2006 at 4:41 pm:

And I bet if Brian, Scott, Damion & I all joined forces for a group blog, we could maybe earn a whole dollar a month off AdSense.

Actually, I’ve been making about $5/month off of AdSense when I have the ad in an obvious location (that is, not at the bottom of the page). Yeah, it’ll still take about 2 years to meet the $100 minimum before Google cuts a check, but it’s something! If we did join forces, we’d probably have enough for one night of mild drinking at the GDC!

Have fun,

Ignferroque said on December 10th, 2006 at 6:38 am:

Scott actually went with Project Wonderful at the beginning of the month. As of today, I’ve paid out a total of $9.61 at $1.05/day. If he reads this article, I’d be interested in finding out how much of that he receives. To date, the ad there has sourced two applications: one from the person who saw the ad and then another from his son who applied at his suggestion. At $5 per application, I’d say that’s a great response. I actually haven’t done the numbers on my other ads, so I can’t provide specific comparisons but I’m curious enough now where I’ll do the math at some point.

If anyone’s interested in the perspective of an advertiser, feel free to ask me questions here or just PM me via my website; I’m happy to answer them.

This is the only screenshot I have uploaded at the moment; a month old, it’s not particularly representative at this point. I passed the $700 mark yesterday and will approach the $1000 mark by Saturday when I’ll close out my recruiting campaign until the expansion releases.

Heartless Gamer said on December 10th, 2006 at 7:47 pm:

If you are going to run ads you mine as well run ones that will pay out before you make $100. Adsense on blogs really just makes Google money. My choice of blog advertisement is Chitika Inc’s eMiniMalls. Not only do YOU select and control what advertisement category shows it is actually quite easy to fit into any theme.

Now it is a big no-no to talk about how much I pull in with my single advert, but lets just say I can usually pay an MMO subscription for a month and I barely have any traffic compared to some of you.

As long as you don’t spam the advertisements I see no harm in them at all and since it pays out monthly as long as you get $10 it is the premiere choice for bloggers IMHO.

Allen Sligar said on December 11th, 2006 at 10:14 am:

@Evangolis:

http://www.sphere.com/

thereas another web 2.0 start up that actually does exactly what your asking for, I just cant recall it….

brent said on December 15th, 2006 at 3:53 pm:

Another approach to this: http://www.virginworlds.com/pg.php?n=4836