Featured Blog: Brothers-Brick.com?!

That's right, we're moving!

After more than a year and a half on Blogger, The Brothers Brick (TBB) is moving to its own domain at Brothers-Brick.com.

In addition to being the continuation of this blog, the new Brothers Brick represents a merger with two other LEGO blogs, Pan-Pacific Bricks (PPB) and Unique Brique Techniques (UBT). We've moved nearly a thousand posts from all three blogs over to the new domain, and we're in the process of categorizing them.

We haven't picked a permanent theme ("template" in Blogger-speak) yet, posts in the RSS feed aren't timestamped correctly, and there are a few other rough spots, but you can expect the same high-quality LEGO posts from Josh, Linus, Nathan, and me -- even as we work out these details.

My personal thanks to my three co-bloggers for working so hard to find and post the best LEGO creations here on the old TBB. And to all our readers, a collective "Thank you!" from all four of us. Your links, suggestions, and comments have made this blog much more than the four of us could have created on our own. We look forward to your continuing support on Brothers-Brick.com.

(A couple housekeeping items: Those of you on the RSS or Atom feed, please switch to the new feed. Web site administrators and bloggers, we would greatly appreciate your linking to Brothers-Brick.com instead of dunechaser.blogspot.com.)

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Technorati tags: LEGO Blogging The Brothers Brick

LEGO wants to know: What car should they release as a set?

The LEGO Company wants to know from the adult LEGO collector community what car they should make as a set. Once again via the furiously typing fingers of LEGO Ambassador Nelson Yrizarry, the Brothers Brick has received the following message from LEGO:

The LEGO Design team is considering making a kind of collector's car, and would like to hear from the AFOL community which car would like to be seen as an official LEGO set. The only restrictions are:

- The car should be for display, which means with only few functions.
- The car should get a body build with System bricks.
- The car should be very iconic/well know in Europe and US.
- The car should be from the past 30 years.

Please suggest the Make and Model of the car you would like to see as a new LEGO set!

Nelson will collate responses you leave here on TBB and pass them along to LEGO. How cool is that? Thanks Nelson!

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Technorati tags: LEGO Cars Sets Products Collecting

News: Space will be back!

Straight from the typing fingers of newly minted LEGO Ambassador Nelson Yrizarry:

Yes - It's official. Space will be returning.

That's all I can say.

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Technorati tags: LEGO Space

Dave DeGobbi's Goliath Steampunk Airship

The post you're looking for has moved. It's now on Brothers-Brick.com.

Have the Internet and Blogging Improved LEGO Creativity?

Alan Lopuszynski over at Burbanked linked to Linus' recent post about robbed's Terminator head and asks an interesting question I'd like to put in front of TBB readers:

Impressive? Absolutely. Yet it begs the question: were people this creative before the Internet offered an outlet with which to showcase their efforts? Because in our youth, we were lucky to construct a rocket car out of Legos that actually looked like it was capable of rolling down the upstairs hallway. We have to wonder, had we the benefit of the self-affirming effects of a blog and complimentary comments from people all over the world, whether things might have turned out quite differently in life.

So, dear readers, what do you think?

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Technorati tags: LEGO Creativity Innovation Internet Blogging Burbanked

Double the Bloggers, Double the Trouble!

Heh heh, I think you'd have to be blind and/or illiterate not to have noticed a few recent changes to The Brothers Brick. It's taken a few days to get everything lined up, and there may be a few more changes in store, but without further ado, I'm pleased to welcome Linus Bohman and Nathan Wells to the Brotherhood of the Brick!

As he says in his own introduction, Linus joins us from Classic-Space Forums and From Bricks to Bothans. In his non-LEGO life (hey, we do have lives outside LEGO; more on that below), Linus is a student in Sweden and blogs his thoughts and photographs at Picturing the World. I've featured Linus' creations here on TBB many times, and look forward to his coverage of all things sci-fi and the world of tomorrow -- Space, Star Wars, steampunk, and so on.

Nathan Wells joins us from Classic-Castle Forums, Brickfilms, the wonderful Unique Brique Techniques, and his own blog, Behind the Redwood Curtain. Nathan and I have seen eye-to-eye on what makes a good LEGO creation for quite some time, competing and stealing liberally from each other. I expect Nathan will continue to highlight interesting building techniques on UBT, but I'm also overjoyed to have him taking on a role here, where he'll be handling all things fantastical and real -- Castle, Town, etc. One area of the LEGO world underrepresented here on TBB is LEGO-based animation, so I hope to see lots of brickfilms from Nathan (including his own).

I also hope Josh will be able to begin blogging here on TBB again soon, but real life (such as a new baby) is always the highest priority.

Which makes an appropriate transition to me. One reason I'm recruiting new contributors is that I've been neglecting the sort of Japanese-themed creations and overseas events that I had been blogging on Pan-Pacific Bricks. I have quite the backlog of interesting news and creations, but that takes much more time than posting the latest minifigs or mecha (which I'll continue handling myself here on TBB). Handing off themes like Space and Castle -- as much as I love them -- will enable me to be a better bridge between English-speaking LEGO fans and our compatriots across the Pacific.

Unfortunately, I've also been neglecting my creative writing. Regular readers should know by now that I'm passionate about writing and literature, and a few of you may already know that some of my poetry has been accepted by a major literary journal (I'm sure I'll find an excuse to let you know when it's actually been published). As much as it pains me to say so, time spent blogging about LEGO has made it more difficult to take full advantage of that huge break. I need to spend more time writing poetry and to do a better job managing my creative writing career. All of you out there have been very loyal readers, and I thought you deserved to know one of the primary non-LEGO reasons I'm making these changes.

So, enough about the people. Back to the LEGO!

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Technorati tags: LEGO Blogs Blogging Brothers Brick Linus Bohman Nathan Wells Josh Wedin Andrew Becraft

One Year and 500 Posts Later...

This is the 500th post here on The Brothers Brick. Woo hoo! Last month, on July 24, this blog also celebrated its first birthday. Yee haw! (And a happy birthday to pootling today!) Let the long-winded, self-satisfied retrospective post begin...

A lot has changed in the LEGO blogosphere since my first post. When I launched "Dunechaser's Blocklog," as it was called back then, I was following the lead of bloggers like Bruce (of VignetteBricks), Jon Palmer (of Zemi.net), and Azumu (of LEGO-BINGO). A year ago, I could count the number of LEGO blogs I knew of on my fingers.

Today, there are over a hundred LEGO blogs in both English and Japanese, with an increasing number of blogs in other languages. Most blogs focus on a particular theme, with MINDSTORMS NXT a very popular subject (traffic to The NXT STEP absolutely dwarfs traffic to this blog). It sometimes seems like I run across a new blog just about every day. The number of blog posts Technorati has tracked that include the word "LEGO" should give you some indication of just how much the LEGO blogosphere has grown in the last year:

The online LEGO community as a whole seems to have changed somewhat over the last year. Although LUGNET, Brickshelf, and forum memberships continue to grow, I sense a shift toward blogging and Flickr (which itself includes many community features).

This blog has also grown substantially. I started out just planning to use my blog to feature my own creations but I quickly started featuring minifigs from other builders. I posted once or twice a week, and both comments and incoming links were rare. I installed StatCounter last December and was surprised to find that there were actually people reading my blog! When my Aztec gods were featured on Boing Boing, traffic spiked dramatically:


The Boing Boing spike hides a slow, steady growth in readership over the last eight months, especially in the number of regular, returning readers (the orange part of the graph):



As I started to post more creations from other builders and began finding and linking to other blogs, many bloggers returned the favor (along with an increasing number of non-LEGO blogs). And as I added more content and the links increased my Google page rank (4, according to PRChecker.info), people began finding this blog in both keyword and image searches:



Readers arrive here from other blogs (Unique Brique Techniques is the top referring LEGO blog), Technorati, search engines (mainly Google), and of course the forums where I post regularly. On any given day, about 250 to 300 of you who visit The Brothers Brick, from all over the world (this doesn't include those of you reading posts in RSS/Atom feed readers and aggregators like ILENN):



On one hand, it makes me very proud that my little LEGO blog has found a measure of success, but on the other hand, it's very humbling (and a bit overwhelming) to know that so many people rely on The Brothers Brick for their daily LEGO fix.

I don't know what the LEGO blogosphere or The Brothers Brick will look like in another year, but it's been an absolute blast finding and featuring so many cool LEGO creations. Builders, keep building great stuff. And readers, thanks for all your support!

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Technorati tags: LEGO Blogging Statistics Google Analytics StatCounter The Brothers Brick