Blogs. What’s The Point?

Following on from last week’s marketing websites column we move onto another what’s the point question: blogs. Over the last couple of years, we have had a spate of blogs popping up all around the gaming community. From better known gaming sites or magazines telling their readers what they are playing at that moment to big name developers telling us that they have completed small section of their project or adding in blog posts when they could be coding their masterpiece.

So with the rather quiet launch of the EU’s very own Playstation Blog yesterday (Thursday) I have to ask do they offer a platform for useful talk or are they just a place for companies to spin PR to targeted gamers? Do they offer up any useful bites for gamers that you can’t gleam from other sources, at times quicker?

The gaming community has so many places to go for news and information, you can visit any number of games news sites that are updated throughout the day with gaming specific news or you can visit the companies or publishers forum and get information there. If it is a certain title or system you’re looking for information on then you can look up the information on the game’s or platform’s minisite. Indeed nowadays the fastest way in which to get that much wanted information is Twitter as almost all big sources of information have a Twitter account. So why do we have all these blogs popping up?

It may seem strange for me to say this but I am actually all for blogs. They offer a insight into what’s going on and can be useful to announce big news to the people that matter the most first. The US Playstation Blog is just one such example of how well a blog works, it dishes out important information almost weekly for Playstation users in the US of A. When there is a firmware update it is normally the PS Blog that has the information up there and out to the masses before any news service, that could be down to how terrible SCEE and SCEA PR departments can be for getting the press releases out or just the fact that the blog is quite literally the lion’s mouth I’m not sure. But the important thing is that people get the information that is important to them in a speedy time.

But the bigger question I suppose now is that whether the advent of Twitter has meant that blogs aren’t as useful as they were or could have been. I mean it is so much easier to have a 140 letter update saying “Look! This is happening.” than it is to have a 500 word blog post to say the same thing in a more roundabout way. So I ask you guys out there, what do you think of blogs? Do you think that Twitter is actually a better focus for news from companies? Or do you think that having a nice blog post gives you a nice long article to chew on and think about? Please post your comments below.

Also on a side note for those who were expecting a opinion piece on the upcoming E3 event never fear it is coming but instead of a “I believe this is going to happen” piece I thought that it would be much more interesting to discuss actually events that have happened rather than predicting them.