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Originally Posted by Tomkat
If we have a more community driven product, then people may join the community and then go on to sign up for Planetarion, rather than vice versa...?
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Which is exactly why I stated that community driven initiatives do have a place somewhere just not as part of the portal directly as its a marketing tool that needs to give off a certain impretion to those visiting. With blogs atm I see 3 ways of making them a valuable commodity without effecting the marketing factors of the portal
- Farm it out to the community. Encourage someone to set up an external website providing PA Players with a blog. The advantage of this is when people post PA related blogs they dont have to worry about speaking their mind as its not an official site. However the problem may be that I'm unsure how much community draw it would have on its own, it may need some other community driven initiatives attached to it to make it a site the community would want to go to
- Using the forums and private blogs. Alot of people already have private blogs and a number of people do post blog style threads on the forums (GD especially) and a tighter relationship could be developed between the two. All players should be encouraged to start a blog, be it on your own server or using someone like blogger and guides could be provided to help people out . If they make a post that they think its insigtful, thought provoking, funny or simply something they want advice about they would be allowed to cross post it on a elivent forum including at the start the line "Originally posted at http://linktoblog.com". In return they would stick PA in their link section on their blog. They could also put their blog link in their sig, This then provides cross promoting of each other, gets more forum activity and gets the word out about PA to the wider community.
- PA sets up a separate blogging website. It could still use the portal login so anyone creating a blog or registering to post comments is just one step away from having a planet. It heaverly advertises PA but blogs are on any subject and its not directly part of the portal,maybe listed as a partner site on the portal or something. As its not directly part of the portal a little more freedom on posts could be granted (not as much as a fully independent community project but more than it being on your main marketing site).
From a workload pov #2 is probally the best option although something like #3 would be an intresting development that would offer intrestung promotion opertunities