Justin and his favourite cut-out. Didn't say who's who though.

If you are a frequent patron of the MMO blogoshpere you might have noticed a peculiar abundance of tips for new bloggers lately. For the full month of May bloggers shared their experiences about starting a blog and how to find your own voice. This deluge of info was no accident.

In stead it was the result of the “Newbie Blogger Initiative” (NBI for short), and the man behind that initiative was Justin “Syp” Olivetti, Senior Contributing Editor at Massively and keeper of the blog Bio Break. It has been a while since we did a community feature here at GWOnline, so when the Newbie Blogger Initiative came along we knew it was just the right topic to get the series going again! Luckily Justin was happy to answer a few questions.

GWOnline: How did you first come up with the idea of NBI and how did you go about getting the ball rolling?

Justin: The NBI is a pseudo-sequel to a similar community event we did with Warhammer Online blogs back in 2009. Both times, it was born out of a desire to encourage new bloggers to enter the scene and make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Starting up a new blog can be a formidable experience: You have to get into the habit of writing constantly while finding your voice and an audience. The NBI’s goal was to make this less formidable by doing two things: providing sage advice from long-time bloggers and throwing lots of traffic to these new blogs so that they could find their footing.

I thought of doing the NBI in April, and began to contact many of the bloggers that I read. It took me a few days, but I sent out around 70 or so emails outlining the project, and most everyone agreed. From there, I set up a forum to use as the NBI headquarters and watering hole, tried to structure the duties of all the sponsor blogs as best I could, and then told everyone to go nuts on May 1st. And go nuts they did.