Massive Blips Bloops

Massive Blips is gone.

I woke up this morning and found their feed down.

Their site now redirects to this message (click to enlarge):

Thank you for your interest

Massive Blips was, until yesterday, a site that tracked and helped promote MMO related blogs.  It was one of a set of similar sites under the DailyRadar brand which also included WoW, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, and other gaming categories as well as a large number of non-gaming topics.

DailyRadar was somewhat in the Digg category of business models.  It produced no content of its own.  It just tracked the what other people were posting on their blogs, but tried to chop things up into categories of interest.  You could also sign up for an account and vote for posts.

I ran their Top Stories feed in my side bar for just over a year as a second source, after VirginWorlds, of posts in the MMO blogging community.

While the purpose of the site was to direct people to the community, Massive Blips never generated much in the way of traffic for me.  But as a site it seemed to be… under utilized.  A post with a dozen votes was huge.

And their tracking model did produce some questionable results, like SynCaine being flagged as the top WoW blogger for weeks on end.

But I still I found the site interesting to watch.

It was a good way to find blog posts on the same subject.  During the RealID revolt, you could find all sorts of posts, both pro and con, on the subject by heading over to MassiveBlips.

They tried to track which MMOs were being talked about the most, though with WoW in the picture, the top three tags tracked for the last year have been World of Warcraft, Blizzard, and Cataclysm.  I didn’t really need MassiveBlips to tell me that.

But the tag that was in fourth place was often a reflection of what was going on.  Star Wars: The Old Republic occupied that spot frequently, but not always.  Lord of the Rings Online was there for a few weeks after the announced their free to play transition.  And recently, also after a free to play business model announcement and the announcement of EverQuest Next, EverQuest bubbled up to the fourth spot.

It was also a good way to find new blogs or interesting posts from blogs you might not read regularly.  And the barrier to entry for having a story listed was pretty low.  If somebody linked from a post to your post, that was usually enough for your post to be listed and tracked.  You could also submit stories manually.

And the system didn’t get abused very often.  There was one WoW gold selling group that kept submitting their own stories and once in a while some porn site would try to get their stuff listed.  And then there was Temerity Jane.  I have no idea why her posts were regularly listed on the site.  We did certainly get to read a lot about her and Phil.  But other than TJ, the editorial staff kept things pretty much under control, so spam was never a bit deal.

The company which ran the site, Future US (which produces magazines as well, including PC Gamer, Nintendo Power and World of Warcraft: The Official Magazine) still runs quite a few other site, including GamesRadar.

But DailyRadar, and the MassiveBlips site, those are now gone.

So my blog outlives another gamer/blogger community site.  And my blog isn’t even that old.

Is anybody else doing something like MassiveBlips?

EQ2-Daily still does this sort of thing for EverQuest II posts, and they even have the voting aspect now, but is there anything else out there like this for the MMO blog community in general.