Jeff Minter has done so for years, as have some others to varying degrees. Some companies even tried to tap into the power of blogging about development life for certain games.

Maybe an obstacle is the time and effort difference between music and games. Checking out a new band can take only minutes. Find their page, download and listen to an mp3, and you've already got an idea how you feel about them.

For a game, you go to the page. Maybe there is a demo or freebie to try. Want to download a 200MB demo on dial-up? You download it and then might have to try to get it to run on your system. Then you spend an unknown amount of time playing it (versus simply listening,) just to decide whether you should have hope in this developer.

No demo? Maybe you spend your time downloading videos that may be bigger than the final game executable. And how long until the game is released? Months? Years? Maybe never. In the meantime, you have only promises and hope that it will be worth the wait. After all, hearing a new song from a band isn't quite the same as seeing the render for the new monster on level 3 of a new game. The time stretch can weaken general interest as well.

Does a forum count?

Well I think it's because when you're working on your blog, you could be working on your game.

It's the trade off I make and it's why I only blog once or twice a month; although I expect to be blogging more when I get closer to debuting my next game.

http://blog.hanfordlemoore.com

I've been blogging about the development of my new indie game, Brainiversity, on www.gamemusings.com. The game is due for release in the next few weeks and I'm starting to get more people drop by my blog.

I think these things just take time to build up - and of course you have to have something that people can be fans of :-)

We've been making Indie and casual games for years, and we recently realized that no one really knows who we are or what we do. We started a site to cover exactly what you describe above here: http://www.8bitrocket.com

It's a sad fact that most of the *hundreds* of indie game dev blogs which already exist are horrible - I include our own at Mode 7 to some extent. It's also telling that the author here is so misinformed as to call for more of the things - the indies with blogs haven't done a good enough job of reaching him. His real question should be, "Why don't indies market their blogs more?" Making a blog good and then getting people to read it is yet another full-time job that indies without PR resources don't have time to do, and this is one of the reasons that so many fail. Creating content is not enough - games and blogs alike. Indies need to understand that marketing is just as vital as development and invest in it more in general.

To be fair, Paul, I am the Chairman of the Independent Games Festival in my 'copious spare time', and I have at least a couple of hundred sites, including plenty of indies, on my blogroll.

I guess I was thinking of creators that I particularly know about, like the Chronic Logic guys, Jon Blow, Jon Mak, etc - a lot of the most interesting creators have very poor insight into their lives and/or creative processes via the Web, which is a shame, I think.

But I am also trying to learn and communicate on about everyone's journey here, so have added you guys to my blogroll!