Mapping the Blogosphere

Although I was already following this project, yesterday a number of friends, readers, and patrons pointed out its latest development, which is really quite fascinating. The blogger Elmcat put in a lot of effort to map out the tabletop RPG blog scene in the form of a graph that shows "nodes" and "edges" – the web of connections (in the form of links) between blogs and their posts. The resulting map, shown above, is very impressive and genuinely interesting for the way it shows the distinct ecosystems that exist within the larger blogosphere, as well as the relative influence a blog has through its posts and links in and out.

The image above is a combined map, depicting the RPG blogosphere from 2003, when the first gaming blog appeared, to the present day. Consequently, it's not representative of our present moment, which looks like this:

As you can see, the 2025 map is a lot less cluttered, owing to the fact that there a lot fewer active blogs and blogs, in general, are not nearly as widely read as they were prior to the rise of social media. Even so, there are still quite a large number of blogs out there and, though their influence is waning, they continue to generate discussions (and arguments) within that portion of the RPG hobby that reads them.

Elmcat's map is an amazing piece of work. If you go to it, you can sort it by year, from 2003 to 2025, and zoom in to view it more closely. This enables you to see the name of each node, which is to say, each blog and its connections to other blogs. I find that feature the most remarkable thing about the map, since it visually represents the distinct "scenes" within the hobby and how closely (or not) they are to one another. 

Likewise, the relative influence of each node is apparent by its size and color, with influential blogs being bigger and darker in color. In case you're wondering, the big orangish-red node in both of the above maps is Grognardia. Here's a zoomed in version of the first map, the one that covers all years between 2003 and 2025

Aside from the gratification of knowing that, despite it all, this blog retains a place of prominence within its corner of the RPG blogosphere, it's great to see the names of so many of the great OSR blogs of yore, many of which are now defunct. 

Zooming in on Grognardia's solar system in the 2025 version of the map is interesting, too, but for a completely different reason – so many of today's most prominent blogs are unfamiliar to me. Mind you, I don't read as widely online as I used to, tending mainly to my own little garden, but, even so, seeing what the big and influential blogs are nowadays was genuinely eye-opening. It's a reminder that I probably need to devote more time to reading and interacting with the wider hobby again, something I haven't really attempted since the First Age of Grognardia. I suspect it might do me some good.

In any case, I highly recommend you take a peek at Elmcat's blog post, which is a stunning piece of work. This is the kind of stuff we used to see more of in the past and I want to support and promote it when we see it again.