Eric Martindale

As many of you know, a lot of my best friends came from an online hobby called "online roleplaying". One of the more popular forms is a type of collaborative fiction called "play by post", in which the participants alternate writing sections of the story. More succinctly; I started a roleplaying site of my own in 2005 called RolePlayGateway to give people the same opportunity I had when I was younger.

I wanted to take a moment and go over some of my favorites, for those who are reading.

RolePlayGateway: an obvious favorite. It takes a little while to find your place (if you're a more 'advanced' roleplayer), but our strength is the wide range of people that play here. Oh, and we have an awesome chat built specifically for roleplaying!

Roleplayer Guild: Run by Dan Neumann, Roleplayer Guild is as close to a sister site of RolePlayGateway as it gets. They've got a slightly different format from RolePlayGateway, letting you browse roleplays based on their "quality" level (e.g., Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced). A great place to go if you're looking to start a nice tight-knit group!

Althanas: Althanas is one of the only other large sites dedicated completely to play-by-post roleplay. I've roleplayed here for a couple years (as an anonymous account!) and they're a great group. The "Guides" sections is irreplaceable, so if you're looking to learn, this is the place to be.

Up and coming!

These sites are new or are just getting off the ground, so they're not as established as the above listings.

Roleplaygetaway: launched as a refuge from the insanity that RolePlayGateway provides, RolePlayGetaway (albeit, a confusing name) is showing a lot of promise. With a brand new roleplaying system built to track your roleplays, it is taking the same route that RolePlayGateway's fabled roleplay tab is taking. It's being run by several of my staff members and close friends, and I can attest that they know what they are doing. I hope to see more sites like this!

Fallen off my list...

These sites used to show some promise, but for some reason or another have fallen by the wayside. As such, I'm rel="nofollow"'ing their links.

AnimeLeague: AnimeLeague appears to have gone the way of AnimeMetro; that is, it has begun to focus more on Anime and conventions instead of roleplay. Sadface! Gaia Online: Gaia Online used to be a fairly decent place for play-by-post roleplay, but then it got uber popular. It too is now expanding beyond play-by-post, and the focus has been lost.

RPGChat is one of the other large roleplaying forums out there, and they've been around since about May, 2001. Since then, RPGChat has gone through many evolutions, and has expanded rapidly - they started with a forum, grew into a decent sized roleplaying chat, and finally removed the chat and went back to forums.

You'll immediately notice the large number of forums, which for most boards isn't an issue. In today's roleplaying world, RPGChat's index fits right in.

They've got four basic navigation options at the top of the page, which are images instead of text, which isn't very good for SEO. The four menu options are Home, Forums, Chat, and Rules. I gave each of them a shot, but it looks like only the "Home" and "Rules" link work.

I'm going to take a look at their code, because using images for links isn't horrible if you specify the right attributes. Let's have a glance:

<a href="http://forums.rpgchat.com/index.php"> <img src="header/but_home.jpg" border="0"> </a>

Yikes! Not only does the anchor not have a title attribute, but the image doesn't have an alt attribute! Search engines won't be able to understand the context of these links, and the flow of link juice to the two working links won't be very beneficial.

I participated on these forums for a few months as the username Alighieri, for that period, I became the single most active user in their welcome forum. I posted in several other topics, but got pretty frustrated with the limitation on the length of a post (20,000 characters).

When attempting to post a profile for one of my characters, I was immediately snubbed by the limitation. This makes well-researched posts difficult to make, specifically with the citations that must be put in place for accurate references. Ultimately, I was forced to cut out portions of my character's history to fit it into the post.

After posting for a few weeks nonstop in the Welcome Forum, I headed off to the The Arena area, where turn-based fighting is largely popular. I opened a topic with a list of the top turn based fighters, placed into a neat little image and posted right into the topic. It took a few days to get any response at all, (save for a few people who contacted me over AIM) and when I did get a response, I logged in to RPGChat to find that I had been banned for "advertising on multiple occasions", much to my surprise.

However, while my visit was cut short, I met some good friends, and had some great discussions. Unfortunately, the forum does not allow any links to external sites of any kind, and also does not allow signatures, which makes it very difficult to spread the word about the topics you start there. This isn't very good for encouraging member interaction, and makes it very difficult for momentum of any sort to be gained within the community.

After speaking with someone who had messaged me on AIM prior to my banning, I confirmed my worst fears - RPGChat is a closed community, and is not very open to outside communities or positive interaction with those communities. This is the number one concern mentioned to me about RPGChat and their future, and there is ongoing fear of the community continuing to stagnate without any growth other than direct referral.

I sent a request via the site's contact form, as listed at the bottom every page, which merely opened a new email to their support address, forums@rpgchat.com - I sent a couple questions in my email, and I identified who I was, but I haven't yet received a response. It'd be great if we could get an interview with an admin from RPGChat on the history of the site!

In terms of organic visitors, a search for pages on RPGChat has about 16,200 results. When digging through the pages, I noticed that only 477 pages were in the primary index, with the remainder in the supplemental index. That's scary!

Let's take a look at their search results:

As you can see from the above search, we can confirm that there is some duplicate content problems. However, from what we've seen - most of RPGChat's traffic is a result of direct referral. We can identify with the importance of defensible traffic, but organic traffic is also a high-quality method of driving laser-targeted traffic to your site, and it looks like RPGChat is seriously missing out on this.

RPGChat has a relatively active forum; 63,708 threads, 1,925,709 posts, and 59,352 "active" members. While that's only an average of about 30 posts per thread and only about 32 posts per user, they do have some great quality and style elements in their posts that you simply don't see in many other places in roleplaying forums these days. I think it would be a great move for them to deactivate a lot of their older and inactive members, and send out reminders to these users to come back and join in on the fun.

It also seemed like a consensus that the single best area on RPGChat was the Clans & Guilds forum, which most users simply called "C/G" for short. It looks like most other forums' version of a multiverse, where roleplay is freeform, and most action is player-driven with rules being defined by the status quo.

Lack of availability aside, RPGChat leaves a pretty strong impression, and if you're careful to follow their 500 word list of rules, you can likely make some friends and enjoy some great high-quality roleplay. The administration needs to do some overhauling if they're going to keep the community healthy, but for the time being - RPGChat makes for a great roleplaying destination.

Ten years ago, I founded @RolePlayGateway with a few close friends of mine. Against all odds, the community endures.

The author of the particularly famous Wheel of Time series passed away yesterday due to cardiac amyloidosis. Diagnosed with the disease in March of 2006, Jordan, born James Oliver Rigney Jr., vowed to fight the disease and continue his legendary writing career for many years to come. It is a great loss to the fantasy community, and on behalf of RolePlayGateway, we send our condolences to his family and friends, who will no doubt be the most affected by his passing.

You can catch more on Robert Jordan's Official Blog, but due to the high traffic, here's a mirror of his post:

It is with great sadness that I tell you that the Dragon is gone. RJ left us today at 2:45 PM. He fought a valiant fight against this most horrid disease. In the end, he left peacefully and in no pain. In the years he had fought this, he taught me much about living and about facing death. He never waivered in his faith, nor questioned our God’s timing. I could not possibly be more proud of anyone. I am eternally grateful for the time that I had with him on this earth and look forward to our reunion, though as I told him this afternoon, not yet. I love you bubba. Our beloved Harriet was at his side through the entire fight and to the end. The last words from his mouth were to tell her that he loved her. Thank each and everyone of you for your prayers and support through this ordeal. He knew you were there. Harriet reminded him today that she was very proud of the many lives he had touched through his work. We’ve all felt the love that you’ve been sending my brother/cousin. Please keep it coming as our Harriet could use the support. Jason will be posting funeral arrangements. My sincerest thanks. Peace and Light be with each of you, Wilson Brother/Cousin 4th of 3 To Catalyst: Never, never loose faith. RJ did not. Harriet hasn’t. I haven’t. Going through what we have, our faith is only strengthened. Besides, if God didn’t exist, we would have never had Jim. We did. God does. Remember my Brother/Cousin, my friend, think of him fondly and glorify God’s name. Editor’s Note: The entire staff of Dragonmount.com would like to extend its most deepest sympathies to Robert Jordan’s family. He touched all of our lives in some way and we wish him the rest and peace he deserves. We will be posting information in the near future about where you can send condolences. Please check the News Section for these updates.

May you rest in peace.

Running a role playing game online presents a large of amount of flexibility in the way you run the game. You no longer need individual sessions where all players are present, and there are a plethora of options as to where you are going to run it - if you want to run it in any one place.

One of the number one questions I receive relates to the medium for online RPGs. There are tons of different ways of communicating online, mainly grouped into a few categories. We have instant messenger, chats, message boards, and emails. There are a few custom services out there, but I'm going to touch on the four that I've mentioned.

On RolePlayGateway, we have a set of roleplaying forums as well as a roleplaying chat. When you're running an RPG, there are a few items you should consider when deciding where you're going to keep everything.

Forums have the benefit of being static and always available - users can post to forums at any time during the day and be sure that other users (and roleplayers) can see their message. Forums are also very flexible, they allow you to embed images and other multimedia within your posts, allowing you to share any experience with your players. However, it is post based - forums are often not the quickest way to communicate, as it is not a live feed of information like a chat.

Chats, on the other hand, have the benefit of being real time. Games can be run in chat (and instant messenger) on a moment's notice, and work best when all of the players can be available at the same time. Because it is real time, short blip-based sessions such as character conversations and interactions work extraordinarily well with chats. Players can get the chance to interject into other player's actions and statements without the worry of too much time going by. It is for this reason that the longer posts, such as those that exceed a paragraph, are often too large and unwieldy for chats - players end up waiting too long for each post, and will get bored.

Longer posts do very well on forums, where writing an individual post can take half an hour or longer to refine and perfect - just enough time for the players to go look at other games and other topics before they come back and begin formulating their response.

If you're running a game with a detailed and/or complicated storyline or characters, it is always good to post something on a forum for player reference. This lets the players have a place to communicate out of character (OOC) - such as when they won't be able to make a chat session, or when they want to discuss plans for character interaction, growth, or development. Even if your game is already on a forum - it is a good idea to create a place for OOC discussion. For chat-based games - this gives a perfect opportunity for players to jump in at the middle of a game with little trouble, as they simply need to read over the history of the game on the forum, which they can do at any point in time, and less time is needed explaining the game to the player.

Instant messenger works well when dealing with one on one sessions, such as when two characters are the only ones in an interaction or a meeting needs to be private. These interactions can be summarized or written into a cinematic format and then posted to the forum, for other players to enjoy as well. Instant messenger (as well as Private Messages) does very well at asking questions of the other players, which is convenient when you have a question about how they're playing a role or a reference they made in character.

There are also emails - many games aren't run by email anymore, but email is still a very valuable tool. RolePlayGateway like many forums offers you the ability to subscribe to topics. Subscriptions will let you receive an immediate email update whenever someone replies to the thread. This is extraordinarily helpful when there's an RPG with only a few players that can only reply every once in a while, but it requires that people, y'know, actually check their email. RolePlayGateway also has the special ability to instant message you when there's an update to a subscribed thread. All you need is a Jabber account (GMail accounts work, too) and to set up the notifications. We'll send you a message as soon as there's an update.

What methods have you used to manage your online roleplaying games? Are you a fan of forum or chat? Both? What helps you determine where you're going to hold your game? Discuss!

I've always loved Eve Online. It's a space MMO, with ridiculous levels of immersion. They tout that it's the world's largest game universe, and let me tell you - it's absolutely huge.

One of our new members has posted her intentions to work on an Eve Online Roleplaying Journal. I think this is an incredibly awesome idea. It's not new, I've seen character journals before, but it just seems to fit in with Eve's extensive world and role playing experience.

Character journaling is a great way to extend the world of a game and add more depth to both the character and the plot. Be careful that you don't fall victim to the inactivity that often plagues real journaling! Stick to it, and you'll reap the benefits of fleshing out your character and having a solid history of the thought processes involved.

Be sure to check out Emywn's Journal from Eve Online Roleplaying. It looks like it's going to be something I'm going to have to follow using my trusty Google RSS Reader. Good luck, Kethro - and thanks for the idea!

P.S.: Google Reader is an amazing tool that lets you follow your favorite sites and their content without ever checking the page. You can check out my shared items list to see what sort of things I follow, but check out the official Google Reader page for more information.

One of my favorite blogs is run by Martin Reed, and it's about online community building. He's really onto something here, and it's a shame there aren't more blogs out there on the topic (ahem, nudge nudge, wink wink). His content is top notch, and it relates directly to what it is that I do with my sites, particularly RolePlayGateway.

Just today he posted an article on active forum members and their value, and I'll be damned if I didn't forward that article to two teams on RolePlayGateway. And then I submitted it to StumbleUpon for good measure! Keep up the good work, Martin!

Does anyone know of any blogs about online community building? Please, share!

Did you know that we have a feature that lets you share any topic with any of your friends?

We all know how addictive RPGateway is. Don't be alone in your addiction - there is strength in numbers! Share things with your friends and get them addicted, too.

I've been building a lot using Node.js lately. My experience with it has been good, from the ease and simplicity of setting up a realtime die-roller [1] to building an entire education platform [2]. It's a little strange getting your head around the constant callback mentality, but it's otherwise intuitive.

It's good reading some legitimate criticisms of Node.js, though. The author of this post has a point about how using it creates a tightly coupled system, contrary to existing UNIX patterns and presumably creating a maintenance nightmare in the future. I think time will tell, however--especially as parts of the toolchain and deploying solutions mature (I'm looking at you, Joyent!).

Thanks to +James Williams for sharing!

[1] https://github.com/RolePlayGateway/rpg-table
[2] http://www.hangoutacademy.com/

I've been building a lot using Node.js lately. My experience with it has been good, from the ease and simplicity of setting up a realtime die-roller [1] to building an entire education platform [2]. It's a little strange getting your head around the constant callback mentality, but it's otherwise intuitive.

It's good reading some legitimate criticisms of Node.js, though. The author of this post has a point about how using it creates a tightly coupled system, contrary to existing UNIX patterns and presumably creating a maintenance nightmare in the future. I think time will tell, however--especially as parts of the toolchain and deploying solutions mature (I'm looking at you, Joyent!).

Thanks to +James Williams for sharing!

[1] https://github.com/RolePlayGateway/rpg-table
[2] http://www.hangoutacademy.com/

I've been building a lot using Node.js lately. My experience with it has been good, from the ease and simplicity of setting up a realtime die-roller [1] to building an entire education platform [2]. It's a little strange getting your head around the constant callback mentality, but it's otherwise intuitive.

It's good reading some legitimate criticisms of Node.js, though. The author of this post has a point about how using it creates a tightly coupled system, contrary to existing UNIX patterns and presumably creating a maintenance nightmare in the future. I think time will tell, however--especially as parts of the toolchain and deploying solutions mature (I'm looking at you, Joyent!).

Thanks to +James Williams for sharing!

[1] https://github.com/RolePlayGateway/rpg-table
[2] http://www.hangoutacademy.com/

I've been building a lot using Node.js lately. My experience with it has been good, from the ease and simplicity of setting up a realtime die-roller [1] to building an entire education platform [2]. It's a little strange getting your head around the constant callback mentality, but it's otherwise intuitive.

It's good reading some legitimate criticisms of Node.js, though. The author of this post has a point about how using it creates a tightly coupled system, contrary to existing UNIX patterns and presumably creating a maintenance nightmare in the future. I think time will tell, however--especially as parts of the toolchain and deploying solutions mature (I'm looking at you, Joyent!).

Thanks to +James Williams for sharing!

[1] https://github.com/RolePlayGateway/rpg-table
[2] http://www.hangoutacademy.com/

So, entirely not in light of any recent events, I was integrating the chat rules that Vexar wrote into RolePlayGateway's Rules, and I was looking for some examples of forum etiquette that other forums use. In searching, I found this perfectly humorous video:

(I found it on Neil Boortz's website, but since headed over to videojug to get the original. PS, Neil? You're awesome.)

That was probably the best one I found, above and beyond the video I came across that seemed geared towards the Steam forum community, which was a bit too NSFW to actually embed here on my blog. If you'd like, you can go check out posting a new thread on AlbinoBlackSheep.

I'm admin on several online forums, and I'm a moderator on many more; not counting the countless other communities where I'm an active member. I was pretty proud of the rules I put together on Gateway, and I think they're clean, simple, and easy to follow. No one likes being bombarded and tacked down by rules, so I try to keep them as simple as possible. What do you think of them?

How do you manage forum users and set rules? I know Martin Reed has some good tips on forum rules, and there are many others out there that learned a lot from running forums. The best thing that we can do is learn from others, and gather experience on how to handle these issues. What is your approach to forum etiquette?

I'll be fighting at this weekend's "Fight to the Finish II" (Greenville, NC), as the second event run by the Amateur Fight League. Tickets are still available, especially with some great deals available from AFL's Online Store - don't wait, make sure you get your tickets before the weekend. :]

I'm scheduled to weight in as a middleweight (171 - 185 lbs.), which is a step up from my normal weight (170). I've been lifting heavy and training hard, gaining some weight to meet Brian Ward in the ring in my third mixed martial arts fight. Since my last fight against Will Estes was deemed the most exciting fight of the night by StarNews, I've been training harder and working more towards my professional career as a mixed martial arts fighter.

Rest days start after my last training session on Thursday night, so I'll be getting some well-needed rest and relaxation Friday to prepare for the weighin on Saturday morning at the Greenville Convention Center. Afterwards, my friends and I are meeting one of my RolePlayGateway staff members at the Olive Garden in Greenville to enjoy my pre-fight lunch. Then it's off to rest (hoorah for naps), and then later that night - it'll be fight time.

Get in touch with me if you're out in Greenville and you're interested in having lunch with us or if you want to show up for the fight (which is at the Greenville Convention Center, tickets will be available at the doors), you're more than welcome to come.

Let's do the damn thang.

It's been a crazy past couple weeks for me. I've been training up for my next fight (AFL 1, May 17, 2008 Elizabeth City, NC) and staying pretty busy at work. In other news, The Grand Tournament 2008 invitations were sent out, and RolePlayGateway will be hosting the event. I had a blast at the SEO - What You Need To Know Meetup in Raleigh, and met some great people (hi Ashley!), and got connected with the upcoming Advanced SEO Meetup (which I'm really looking forward to, Brian - sorry I missed the first one!).

Two of my friends passed away this past week, Brittany Custer and Chelsea Johnson, in two separate events. It's so sad - both of these girls had an entire life ahead of them.

A few of my friends have also had recent losses, all very devastating in their own way. I don't think you can possible hope to truly offer solace during times like these, but that is no reason to attempt to provide support and care for their loss.

It's a very polarizing view compared to what we often feel - especially looking at the age at which people pass away. With Cyclone Nargis and the China Earthquakes, there's a lot of pain in the world right now. It really makes you wake up out of whatever jaded state you're in and realize that hey, you're human. You're in this with the rest of us, regardless of how much hate you think you have.

I'm not participating in the elections this year. Full stop.

It's not that I don't feel like I can make a difference - it's that I refuse to be involved in what's going to happen next. I'll make my mark in my own way, this year. And hey, on a semi-related note, let me introduce you to an independent documentary (which means do your research to verify any of this) that I thoroughly recommend you sit down for 2 hours and watch. Two hours, give it your full attention.

All of that aside, let's all remember that we're in this together, like I said before. We need to be loving and supporting each other, through all of our trying times. Grow roots so that you might be able to nourish and feed others in their times of need, as we must do this in favor of our own health. (See The Golden Rule, figure 1.1)

For everyone who has lost someone, remember that everything has a cause and effect. You are still here and play a part in the effect of your loss - it is up to you to determine how you learn from and use the experiences you shared with this person. Be joyous and put these experiences to positive use, sharing and growing in their spirit.

Take refuge amongst your own family and friends - just as you have been there for them, they will be there for you.

One of the sites I own and run (RolePlayGateway) has a pretty large forum, with several customizations and features that I've added on to the base install of phpBB3. As time went on, we continued upgrading the servers (moving from GoDaddy shared hosting to GoDaddy virtual dedicated servers, then onward to MediaTemple's (gs), and now we're on the second tier of MediaTemple's (dv) hosting) in an effort to keep the hardware moving as fast as possible.

As I'm sure you know, hardware can be pretty expensive! One month, while on MediaTemple's Grid Server, we racked up $600 in CPU time overage charges. (Ow.) Now that we've moved onward to bigger and better packages, we're shelling out just about $100 per month for a rock-solid server solution that can be upgraded seamlessly in the future. But since upgrades can only go so far without being prohibitively expensive, I thought it was time to take a look at some of our coding approaches.

Enter memcache, the distributed database caching solution originally designed by LiveJournal to help them deal with massive databases and large volumes of users. DavidMJ has written some shiny ACM modules to help phpBB3 make use of some caching systems, and a memcache module was among them.

That didn't work so well. It gave about a 50% boost to phpBB3's performance (which was great!), but we were still choking the server, and ended up upgrading to a bigger and more robust package with MediaTemple. So I started looking into more options, and DavidMJ suggested xcache. So I go grab xcache and compile it, then enabled it in php. Bingo! There's a 500% boost in our page compile times, and across most of our pages we're now well under 0.1 second compile times. (With the exception of viewtopic.php, which frequently approaches 2 seconds due to bad coding on my part... this will be fixed soon.)

So now that I've got the thirst for speed, let's take a look at how we're performing. To do this, use the apache benchmarking tool:ab -n 100000 http://www.mydomain.com/my_page This will test the URL you specify 100,000 times, and give you some feedback about how the page performs. You'll end up with something looking like this:

Server Software: Apache/2.2.3 Server Hostname: www.mydomain.com Server Port: 80 Document Path: /my_page Document Length: 0 bytes Concurrency Level: 1 Time taken for tests: 15.30100 seconds Complete requests: 1 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Non-2xx responses: 1 Total transferred: 715 bytes HTML transferred: 0 bytes Requests per second: 0.07 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 15030.100 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 15030.100 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 0.00 [Kbytes/sec] received Connection Times (ms) min mean[+/-sd] median max Connect: 0 0 0.0 0 0 Processing: 15030 15030 0.0 15030 15030 Waiting: 30 30 0.0 30 30 Total: 15030 15030 0.0 15030 15030

Some tweaks to the default xcache config that I recommend:

Set the number of caches to one per processor on your server! ; set to cpu count (cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep -c processor) xcache.count = 4

This post will be updated as I explore phpBB3 and more server side options. (I wrote part of this post, then stopped writing... and figure I'd publish it a couple days later anyway!)

While marketing RolePlayGateway, one of the things we considered was the "virality" of our approach. Viral marketing is any marketing technique that induces Web sites or users to pass on a marketing message to other sites or users, creating a potentially exponential growth in the message's visibility and effect. We're going to guide you on the road to a truly viral campaign.

A successful viral push can be launched simply by following three simple rules.

1. Don't spend everything you have on a single campaign.
2. Don't rely entirely on one vehicle of viral marketing.
3. Be different from everyone else; stand out.

While we're not nearly viral enough, part of our success so far has been the evangelism of our passionate users. And there you have it, one of the most important keys to successful viral marketing:

Passion: Users who are passionate about your service, your community, or your site. They will propagate, they will evangelize, and ultimately will generate more passionate users who will do the same thing for you. Dawn Anfuso calls these members Boomers - and it is important to not ignore them.

Make it easy for your users to share. Make it hard for them NOT to share. Add a feature on your site that encourages them to send an email to their friends about the service. Add blocks where they can copy and paste code straight to their social profiles on sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo. Jeanne Jennings wrote an amazing article on Optimizing the "E-mail This" Marketing Opportunity, and I'd recommend you read it and implement the things you learn from it.

Widgetize: On that note, we arrive on one of our most powerful vehicles for viral marketing: Widgets. The list of sites that you can infect with widgets are endless. From iGoogle to individual sites, widgets encourage users to put your tool on their page. Be sure to incorporate other techniques here: Include encouragement to share it. Make it easy to post elsewhere and share.

One of the items that RolePlay Gateway could utilize to great success is the concept of game trailers. Many of the games on RPGateway are text-based, and have no real graphics. However, most of these games have amazing storylines, storylines which could be utilized to hitch audiences, or at least entertain them. Flash-based videos, or trailers, with pivotal content, captivating video and audio, and viral marketing elements such as "Email this!" or "Share This", would be an amazing leap forward. Take a look at how YouTube's video player works. Such trailers could even be uploaded to social networking sites, like YouTube and Google Video, and shared to millions of users with a touch of viral marketing magic.

Juice It Up: Include your URL everywhere you go. Facebook, MySpace. Everywhere. This generates user authority, even if the site you are on has nothing at all to do with your target market. Cross sections are a beautiful thing, and even if you don't get a drop of link juice in comments, market saturation is a very important, yet delicate, part of viral marketing.

Maintain a presence on every social networking site you can sustain. Extend your campaign to all of them. Create social groups for each of these sites, and publicize them. The more targets you hit, just like investing, the less committed you are to that particular market. Your assets are distributed, and while the workload may be unfathomably difficult (keeping up with so many social networking sites sucks... that's why we have ProfileLinker), the potential for success is incredible.

Reward: Another option is to provide tangible rewards for marketing. This can be in the form of prizes, such as in a contest, or to individual users. Incentives are very powerful, and drive many users to promote where they'd be otherwise apathetic. Things can be very simple, such as giving them tokens or credits, to very expensive, such as providing real cash per referral. This is probably the most effective, albeit expensive, method of encouraging users to infect others.

Don't Stop. Don't set these actions in motion and then hope they work. Get involved. Comment on profiles. Reply to messages. Enhance your viral effect. Make it tangible. If users can see that there is a real person there, they will be a lot more enthusiastic and encouraged to participate, and your viral marketing campaign will be more successful.

Other Resources!!! Web Marketing Today has an amazing list of resource articles that are sure to help you build your campaign.

Following suit with the likes of Tim Bray and Eric Meyer, I figured I'd throw together my browser's letter sweep tonight.

• [A]dmin Site. Yeah, I guess I would be visiting the admin panel for this. Quite frequently.
• Mirascape's [B]log. An infrequent haunt of mine, but fairly obvious.
• [C]MON. Cluster Monitor for MySQL Cluster, something I almost always have open.
• Google [D]ocs. This one is painfully obvious, I use Google Docs extensively.
• [E]ricMartindale.com. Okay, that's a gimme. Does this make me egocentric?
• [F]acebook. I'm actually fairly ashamed of this one. Why can't I have a cool F site? sadface
• [G]mail. Three accounts linked using Google's Multiple Sign-in. Open [almost] all day.
• [H]ighcharts JS. A pretty kick-ass Javascript library for generating charts on the clientside.
• [I]nternal Discussion. A site for communication with my team. :)
• [J]Query Mobile Demo, 1.0 alpha 3. I've been spending a lot of time toying with jQuery Mobile, seeing where it's going compared to Sencha Touch.
• [K]r.github.com. Keith Rarick's GitHub redirect. Total ass-kicker.
• [L]inkedIn. Pretty straightforward, between hiring for our team at @Mirascape and the travel to and from various conferences and Meetups lately.
• [M]irascape. The augmented reality platform I'm responsible for.
• [N]oxBot. A nice PHP-powered IRC bot with various plugins. A bit out of date, but very powerful. Been using it for a couple things lately.
• [O]K, QR Me!. A QR Code-generating link shortener I built.
• [P]ostmark. Best Email delivery service I've used. Nice RESTful API, flat rate for emails sent.
• [Q]uora. These guys nail Q&A, and they're doing it pretty well. Check out all their buzz, too. But for some reason, I just don't stick.
• Google [R]eader. “From your 1,040 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 21,549 items, clicked 274 items, starred 853 items, shared 37 items, and emailed 8 items.” -- </stats>
• [S]erver Stats for Mirascape. Powered by Munin, it's how I keep track of the status and metrics of all my servers.
• [T]witter. Not surprising. I love their webapp for my personal use, but own and manage at least five accounts using SplitTweet.
• [U]serVoice. Pretty sweet tool I use for giving the communities I manage a good way to build a consensus on what they desire most. Examples I run: for RolePlayGateway, and EVE UserVoice for EVE Online.
• Google [V]oice. Allows me to use SMS from my computer, read (as opposed to listen to) voicemail. Great tool. If only it supported MMS.
• [W]achovia. One of the places I do banking.
• [X]DA Developers. An indisposable resource for getting rid of carrier-installed crap and running my own choice of software on the hardware I purchased!
• [Y]ouTube. Another big namer. No surprise.
• [Z]ecco. Where I trade most of my public stocks. :)

Surprisingly populist, and there's a lot of Google-owned properties in there. I'm also using Chromium, so I think it prefers the roots of the sites I visit instead of searching through my history for individual pages.

"Roleplaygateway" huh...which one of you is the French Maid?

The glory.

read more | digg story

Eric Martindale had a hangout named roleplaygateway. {url}Eric Rice, Eli McEntire, Vernon Swain-Nisbet, Philip N., Zina Bat, Eric Martindale, Robert Headley, Brad Thompson, Selim Dridi, Brian Aldridge, Corey Barcus, Mat - Langley, Ed Healy, Robert McGee, mohamed ebrahim, Jason Gabriel, Cary Yang, and Tina Parkinson

Eric Martindale had a hangout named roleplaygateway. {url}Eric Rice, Eli McEntire, Vernon Swain-Nisbet, Philip N., Zina Bat, Eric Martindale, Robert Headley, Brad Thompson, Selim Dridi, Brian Aldridge, Corey Barcus, Mat - Langley, Ed Healy, Robert McGee, mohamed ebrahim, Jason Gabriel, Cary Yang, and Tina Parkinson

Eric Martindale had a hangout named roleplaygateway. {url}Eric Rice, Eli McEntire, Vernon Swain-Nisbet, Philip N., Zina Bat, Eric Martindale, Robert Headley, Brad Thompson, Selim Dridi, Brian Aldridge, Corey Barcus, Mat - Langley, Ed Healy, Robert McGee, mohamed ebrahim, Jason Gabriel, Cary Yang, and Tina Parkinson

Eric Martindale had a hangout named roleplaygateway. {url}Eric Rice, Eli McEntire, Vernon Swain-Nisbet, Philip N., Zina Bat, Eric Martindale, Robert Headley, Brad Thompson, Selim Dridi, Brian Aldridge, Corey Barcus, Mat - Langley, Ed Healy, Robert McGee, mohamed ebrahim, Jason Gabriel, Cary Yang, and Tina Parkinson

Interesting article about a startup that has focused on hiring people with Asperger's Syndrome, seeking their attention to detail and comfort with repetition.

I've worked with several people on RolePlayGateway staff, past and present, who have Asperger's. I've been impressed by these same attributes time and time again, but I'm not sure how I feel about seeking them out specifically for these tasks.

Thoughts?

Interesting article about a startup that has focused on hiring people with Asperger's Syndrome, seeking their attention to detail and comfort with repetition.

I've worked with several people on RolePlayGateway staff, past and present, who have Asperger's. I've been impressed by these same attributes time and time again, but I'm not sure how I feel about seeking them out specifically for these tasks.

Thoughts?

Interesting article about a startup that has focused on hiring people with Asperger's Syndrome, seeking their attention to detail and comfort with repetition.

I've worked with several people on RolePlayGateway staff, past and present, who have Asperger's. I've been impressed by these same attributes time and time again, but I'm not sure how I feel about seeking them out specifically for these tasks.

Thoughts?

Interesting article about a startup that has focused on hiring people with Asperger's Syndrome, seeking their attention to detail and comfort with repetition.

I've worked with several people on RolePlayGateway staff, past and present, who have Asperger's. I've been impressed by these same attributes time and time again, but I'm not sure how I feel about seeking them out specifically for these tasks.

Thoughts?

The author of the particularly famous Wheel of Time series passed away yesterday due to cardiac amyloidosis. Diagnosed with the disease in March of 2006, Jordan, born James Oliver Rigney Jr., vowed to fight the disease and continue his legendary writing career for many years to come. It is a great loss to the fantasy community...

read more | digg story

I've been seriously slacking in getting RPGateway's blog up and running, but I've finally gotten around to re-posting the files and re-connecting Wordpress to the database. Now all I've got to do is to get a couple of our admins (and hopefully, one of our loverly owners) to start posting and managing it.

The idea here is to create a single update page where watchers who don't want to be involved in the site can still read updates from the staff. A buzz can be established, and hopefully, some real momentum can be generated with content that is updated daily. The so-called 'blogosphere' (I cringe too, relax.) is a very powerful force in the tubes today, and I think it's important to at least begin to establish some sort of presence here.

I was recently pointed to Trevor Somerville's 30 days to success, and I'm only reminded that articles are the Queen in a world where daily updates are King. Good luck to Trevor, I'll probably swing by once or twice to check up on his progress and see if he has any useful tips.

I started fiddling with some new posting options again, in particular the email posting. Blogger lets you set up a secret email to which you can send blog posts, at which point they'll automatically be added to your blog. I had a contact set up in my Gmail as of (insert long period of time) ago, and I sent a post to it, but I haven't seen anything of it. It looks like the same email, but... apparently not. I guess I'll be reconfiguring this later.

I've been having great experiences with SEO and RolePlay Gateway, we're rising in rankings rather quickly, even after the domain migration. Many thanks to the folks over at DigitalPoint for my education over the past few months. I'm sure I'll be telling these success stories soon, but right now I have to head off to Winston to run a few service calls.

Peace out!

There's some discussion about how forums are or are not social media, (frankly, I don't think there's any question at all) - and it occurred to me the answer of why there is this rift in perception of forums/message boards.

Message boards haven't changed in almost 25 years. There simply hasn't been any real innovation - and that's why there's so much "real" social media out there that's exploding right now. The stuff is so radically different from traditional mediums such as forums that everyone is missing the core of what social media is: community engagement and interaction

So, here are some of the things I'd like to see in a forum, and some things that I've implemented on some of my own forums (heh, or at least planning to implement):

Trackbacks It'd be awesome to have the same functionality in a blog post that we have on Wordpress or other blog software - did I give credit to someone? Let me hit the trackback API to make sure there's a connection between the two posts in the semantic web.

A forum thread is no different than a blog post. It has a topic, a goal, and a discussion pertaining to the original post. Let's see some of the functionality we found in the current decade put to use!

Native RSS Support There's nothing worse than having to write an RSS extension for your forum, and still not have the functionality you want. Give every URL on my forum a /feed, please. This includes forums, threads, posts, users: the whole shebang.

While you're at it, tell Feedburner to support filtered feeds - a lot of my users don't want every single post. And I sure as hell don't want to burn a new feed for every forum. C'mon, let's meet somewhere in the middle.

Semantic URLs Blogging software does it, why do we still have URLs on forums that use IDs right there in the URL? What benefit does that have to the user?

Social Profiles Alright, we've got friends and foes lists on our forums, now - but where is the option to make this information public? Why aren't we displaying a users' friend list on their profile page by default? What about all their most recent posts and actions, and selected excerpts?

A community can only grow in a stifled manner if interaction between members isn't made as easy as humanly possible. Current forum software is stuck in the 90's, with an XHTML wrapper around it. Let's fix this, and soon - before we all melt.

Real Metrics and Algorithms Stop using post count as a legitimate metric. This only encourages poor post quality. Let's see the ability to easily show Flesch-Kincaid, average word count, or something similar. The amount of posts a user has is not a good valuation of their contributions.

Instead, replace these with something more community-driven. Look at Digg for example. There is a solid (questionably) algorithm in place that measures users based on what they've submitted and the reactions of other users' reaction to that content, whether it be a comment or a submission.

Maybe I'm just whining. Maybe I've got legitimate desires. What do you think?

P.S.: And good god, phpBB! Why didn't you include this stuff in your phpBB3 release?!

Hello there, adoring internet-stalkers! (I'm kidding. ~_~) You may have noticed (if you were loyal, that is ;)) that my Feedburner-powered RSS Feed has been lacking in activity lately. There's a reason for that.

Recently, I got rid of WordPress and Sweetcron in favor of a new CMS platform, Chyrp. I had been running Wordpress for a long time, using it to share my thoughts with the general internet populace. However, it had become a bit of a chore to maintain, and it really felt like duplicate work on top of all the other content-generation I was already performing (i.e., forum posts, blog comments, Last.fm "Loved" Tracks, Google Reader shared items, etc.), so I began to look for a way to aggregate this content into a central place.

For a while, FriendFeed served this purpose well, but I didn't like the lack of control I had over the source. Facebook also filled part of this gap (and it still does, to a point), and they've even purchased FriendFeed, but I was looking for something quite a bit more customizable and self-hosted. Through various referrals, I came across Yongfook's Sweetcron project which was a new platform designed specifically for this new thing they called, le gasp, "Lifestreaming".

However, after fighting with Sweetcron and its aggregation methods, particularly its lack of support for various service feed formats; I decided to look into something else. Initial searches landed me upon Tumblr, who had conveniently announced a feature that syncs comments across multiple services (or aggregates). Sadly, I didn't want to get back into a world where all my code was hosted by someone else, and I had no control over it. I kept Sweetcron running on my site under lifestream/, but I continued searching for a better solution.

I then stumbled across Bazooka, which was billed as "the first free PHP tumblelog engine". Thanks to Bazooka developer Evan Walsh, who alerted me to a more up-to-date and current replacement called Chyrp. And I was sold. I immediately spent a few hours converting my existing content from WordPress and SweetCron over to a test installation of Chyrp, and then took the next night changing my site structure and 301'd all my old links to the new URLs.

That's where EricMartindale.com stands today. I've spent a few weeks getting my stream set up the way I want it, and I'm turning the RSS feed back on. Posts should begin flowing into your RSS reader very shortly. Post comments, feedback, and questions here!

Edit 10:13 PM EST: It looks like Feedburner is having some trouble parsing my new RSS content. You can subscribe to my direct feed and it will always work.

Edit 10:58 PM EST: I've fixed the problem and committed the patch to GitHub.

I've been using Twitter since pretty early on (and long before @oprah), and I've found it to be a superbly convenient communication tool and notification service. Even though it's still very young on the web (Twitter was founded in March of 2006) It's been the home to great ideas like the #twitterdata proposal and the publicdomain book-via-tweets project. It's also an awesome reputation management platform, and can be used to both to provide effective customer service and help distribute news and updates about your business or product, which is exactly how I use it for my online roleplaying project.

But as with the rest of the social media world, Twitter can become very complex very quickly (but I still contend that there is no social media overload) and as a result, can be difficult to manage. As a result, I use several third-party tools to help me manage and gather information that helps me do my Twitter job much more efficiently and effectively.

Splitweet [caption id="attachment_196" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Splitweet allows you to post and monitor multiple Twitter accounts and brands."][/caption]

For those of us with multiple Twitter accounts (like some people who create a Twitter account for each roleplaying character they use), Splitweet is an absolute savior. This service allows you to tweet to multiple accounts at the same time, as well as combining the "stream" from each account into one page. A lot of desktop Twitter clients offer this kind of functionality, but where Splitweet truly excels is in its ability to track what it calls "brands" (more reputation management terms here): you can specify keywords and phrases that will appear in a separate feed, even if you do not follow those users. This gets us around the disastrous changes Twitter made to the @replies, and helps us keep up to date on any mentions of our site's name and any tweets relating to what it is that we do.

Sherflock [caption id="attachment_195" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Sherflock provides detailed statistics and summaries of Twitter users you are associated with."][/caption]

Sherflock is an absolutely awesome stat tracking machine that helps weed out the waves of spam that have been coming in since Twitter has gone mainstream. Sherflock gives a large number of statistics about each every account the either follows you or that you are following, and lets you sort and filter users based on these statistics.

Twitterfall [caption id="attachment_194" align="alignnone" width="217" caption="Twitterfall offers a live stream of twitter updates on keywords that you specify."][/caption]

This tool allows you to specify any number of keywords that you wish to view on a live, moving stream of tweets. This is very useful if you are using a computer that allows you to "pin" a window on top (like Ubuntu Linux), or if you have a multiple-monitor rig, or even if you use multiple computers using the input-sharing app Synergy. You'll get a live feed of updates on any topic of your choice, which can even be updated and changed in real-time.

Using these three tools will help you maximize you Twitter performance and make the most of an already awesome service, preventing you from being inundated with the massive stream of messages that you're surely going to subscribe to.

What are your top three Twitter tools? Feel free to make a comment or write your own post, and I'll gladly append a link to this post to help everyone out!