Best of Blogging

Let's be honest: I kind of suspected that I might get mentioned on Best of Board Games for yesterday's quiz. I haven't been mentioned on their blog in a while, and I was starting to feel lonely. OK! I know what that makes me, at least according to Grognads.

Why was that post chosen, when I've obviously written so many fine quality posts since my last mention on their site :-)? What is the best of the blogosphere, anyway?

Skimming through the BoBG site, it appears that what qualifies as "best" is: humorous posts, well defined philosophical articles, technical articles about some aspect of games or gaming, newsworthy events, or long reviews. Rarely, it may be a session report with nice pictures. A few criteria are for certain: it has to stand alone, cover only a single topic, and be a post about board games.

Given that criteria, the "Best of Coldfoot, BGG(1)" could be:

04/13/2005: War of the Rings, Extra Credit Assignment - Reflecting on WotR

07/19/2005: Boardgame Resource List - The original, then updated

But if you look at his archives, you will see many other posts that are just as interesting. Almost every post is a review of one or more games. Most of them are not "earth-shaking enough" to warrant a BoBG posting, or cover two games at once. The BoBG bar is rather high and specific. Anyone interested in the games Coldfoot reviews would be well served reading his reviews.

For instance, other great Coldfoot BGG posts that probably wouldn't make BoBG, but are good reads, include:

03/15/2005: Always summer down south. - Reflecting on the real reason the rest of us are lucky not to live in Alaska

03/28/2005: HotS, YINSH, GIPF, ASL, LotR. - Learning ASL

04/09/2005: Chinatown, War of the Ring, more YINSH - Reflecting on WotR.

05/04/2005: Little Coldfeet - Cute kids

06/30/2005: What's this? - Notices his high ranking by Tom Vasel, and talks about game reviews

and his reviews of reasonable length, which include: age of mythology, blokus, blood feud in new york, bootleggers, buyword, carcassonne: hunters & gatherers (also here), chinatown, china, doom (and here), dos rios, euprat & tigris (and here), explorium, game of thrones, goa, kingdoms, manifest destiny (and here), mare nostrum (and here), mcmulti, medina, napoleonic war, niargra, struggle of empires, and twilight imperium iii.

And that's just his BGG posts.

Excerpting the "best" of a blogger is sort of like excerpting the hits from a record and compiling a "best of" album. To whit: if you like an artist who produces a hit, you may just like the artist as a whole. And the "best" may simply be the most presentable.

The reason that this is a problem is that people are always looking for ways to cut down their reading, and they are turning to a "Best of Board Games" blog as one way of doing it. But as I mentioned ages ago regarding linkpost blogs, a linkpost blog is just one index into a growing world of posts.

By now there should really be other "Best of Board Game" blogs, with their own criteria for selecting "best" posts. And so on, until we get a "Best of 'Best of Board Game blogs' blog".

I would complain more, but I am filled with no small trepidation; Peter of nimrods complained and they made him an official poster to the BoBG blog. Urk.

There is so much out there that would qualify as best, even according to their criteria. Rather than complaining about all that they miss, I will note that they are only five guys. If you see something that needs to be mentioned, submit it to them. Don't let all the good stuff get missed by the masses. All of us like to be noticed, and a lot of what is written deserves to be.

Yehuda

(1) Before Gone Gaming