Why is Flicker Gaming awesome? (part 2 of 2)

People launch their browsers for basically two reasons: either to look something up, or to engage themselves. I think that the more people that get involved in something, the more value people get from participation, and if something is based around a group of active participants, then everyone wins.

I think that creating community is still one of the things that Livejournal has done far better than any other portion of the blogosphere, and that’s the main reason why it will continue to thrive in the face of a very difficult image (immature teenagers writing about cats and stories about the barber shop).

One of the things that we’ve tried to emphasize with Flicker Gaming from the very beginning is how it bridges the world of classic publishing (you read a newspaper without much input) and the world of user-only content (many forums have moderators, but nobody who’s really responsible for regular content).

One of the coolest user-oriented services that has sprung up on the internet recently is Digg, a social bookmarking/folksonomy that uses voting as a mechanism to sift through internet content, finding the most popular links available.

What we decided to do was build that functionality into our Blog’s sidebar. That’s what the Flicker Linkbox is - it’s a place for anyone and everyone to participate on the front page of our site. If you’ve written something cool or found some amazing news on the ‘net, drop it in the Linkbox and it gets thrown up just to the right of our “official” content.

What if the New York Times put letters to the editor on their front page?

Yeah. I think it’s that cool. Because nobody has really tried to integrate good professional writing with active participation of readership in this way.

Although building a community is probably what I’m most excited about doing with Flicker, I should also point out that authenticity makes a difference. Blogs are in the unique position of being very personal and very authentic at the moment.

The informal style of writing, the community engagement, and the flat nature of the internet in general help to make Flicker be a group of people more than just some company. Each post has the name of the blogger attached. We’re all available by e-mail.

I’d much rather be out there as individual gamers writing about cool gaming stuff and linking to neat shit we find all over the place than some Hearst-style monolith of six gazillion people and things.

In other words, I want to be accessible. If someone wants to shoot an e-mail to Flicker, I want them to be able to say “hey, I think I’ll e-mail Jason (or Ethan or Corvus or Ben) and tell them about this really cool thing I saw.”

When we’re part of the community instead of just catering to it, it gives us the extra weight of authenticity, and I think it makes us more likeable. Likeable is always a good thing.

Last but not least in my big list of why Flicker is so awesome is that Video Games are cool and brand new. Well, not brand new, but the video game space on the web is nascent at best.

I’ve watched year after year as PC Gamer, a magazine I’ve subscribed to since 1995, has continued to neglect their website. There are some other major publications who have done better.

But the most active space on the internet that has to do with video games is still Forums. If you look at the numbers on big forums, you’ll see that the IGN boards are the second largest forums being tracked online.

Forums are amazing (and I post at Evil Avatar myself), but they’re not the culmination of internet technology. There’s a big wide open space on the net right now (there are only two other major gaming blogs that I’m aware of - Joystiq and Kotaku), and neither of them really corners the space the Flicker is trying to take.

I think that with a lot of enthusiasm, a little bit of luck, and some dedicated fun, Flicker Gaming has a lot of places to go.