A couple of months ago, I wrote a post detailing the announcement of Giantbomb.com

At the time, the site was a blog where Jeff Gerstmann and Ryan Davis would post news stories, game reviews, and updates as to how the actual site was coming together. It was a great way to keep fans updated as to how everything was going, get some preliminary content going, and ramp up excitement for when the actual site launched.

Finally, at midnight (PST) on July 21, Giantbomb officially “blew up” as it were, and for the next two days, the servers were flooded with users creating accounts and adding all kinds of content to the site.

The website itself is built on a framework designed by Whiskey Media, a website developer and publisher founded by former CNET executive and founder Shelby Bonnie. For more about Whiskey Media, click here. For more about the framework that powers GiantBomb, click here.

GiantBomb, along with two other Whiskey Powered sites, PoliticalBase and ComicVine, is part encyclopedia and part community. This means that there are pages on the site for concepts, images, series, companies, people, etc., all having to do with video games. Each of these pages can be edited like a wiki, but in such a way as that it is far more accessible to the average user who hasn’t learned the (albeit basic) commands used to edit sites like Wikipedia. The site is more heavily moderated than the average wiki as well, as most users can submit an edit to a page, but they’ll need to wait until their edit has been approved by a moderator before it will show up on the site.

GiantBomb differs from other Whiskey sites however, in that it also features a major editorial component; four former Gamespot employees — Jeff Gerstmann, Ryan Davis, Brad Shoemaker and Vinney Caravella — put out a weekly podcast, shoot videos, write game reviews, and report on industry events. In fact, during E3 a few weeks ago, the four of them recorded daily podcasts and videos, posted pictures to Flickr and Twittered from their iPhones that they all bought the weekend before E3 started. Speaking as a user of the site, this sort of attention to detail goes a long way towards establishing who is running things, figuring out their personalities, and it’s something these guys got right from the very beginning.

The community side is also fully loaded, and features a forum at the bottom of every page on the site, as well as a general forum area for discussion of such important topics as Grand Theft Auto IV, the Xbox 360, and Hamburgers. You can also create a user page, which features a Facebook or Gtalk-style status message, user-uploaded images, a “news feed”, and the ability to make lists of anything you see on the site. Anything from “Games I’ll never finish” to, “The League of Extraordinary Mustaches“, which is a list of the greatest mustachioed characters featured in games over the years.

So that’s a basic rundown of what Giantbomb has to offer. Its sister sites ComicVine and PoliticalBase offer very similerly featured sites about comic books and politics, respectively.

Lastly, here is a video that does a good job of portraying the brand of insanity that runs through the editorial wing of GiantBomb.com. Watch it. Seriously.