WSJ had a front page (!!!) story on Friday called “To Find a Mate,
Raid a Dungeon Or Speak Like an Elf” that tells of people who have met their significant others in MMOGs. Luckily, it’s not written as a puff piece or a “hey, look at these weirdos” piece but seriously considers the fact that […]

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In discussing some weird policies in the World of Warcraft online game, Cory Doctorow nicely articulates an important insight about environments like WoW:
Online games are incredibly, deeply moving social software that have hit on a perfect formula for getting players to devote themselves to play: make play into a set of social grooming negotiations. […]

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Virtual worlds can have a deep emotional impact on people. This is as true of an old-fashioned BBS or discussion forum like The Well, as well as for MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games) like the recently deceased Asheron’s Call 2.
Unfortunately, the more resources it takes to run a particular world, the more money it […]

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One problem with the participation model is that so much of it is fueled by idealists. Well, it’s not totally a problem, because we need idealists. But it makes the “movement” behind the model seem naive to the more realistic and/or cynical.
I like to think I’m more cynical than not, though I often surprise […]

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I’m not much of a joiner. I’m not saying I’m too good for it. I just don’t take to it naturally.
So I tend to be a little Johnny-come-lately to the fresh stuff the cool kids are doing.
For example, when I kept seeing “Web 2.0″ mentioned a while back, I didn’t really think about […]

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Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing shares a link to the 100 oldest .COM names in the registry, and wonders about the “visionaries” who might’ve realized they needed a “.com” domain in 1985.
But many of those companies likely weren’t thinking about commercial Internet possibilities. They just happened to be involved in the academic, scientific and […]

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I’m big on the idea that the Internet isn’t really about commerce or information reference, but mainly about community and conversation (which of course include things like commerce and knowledge — but only as facets of the larger social drive).
In Wired last month, (We Are the Web) Kevin Kelly evidently agrees:
What we all […]

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For once, I’m not the last person to hear about something months later.
Google Talk sounds exciting. No voice-capable Mac client for it, but Adium and iChat both work. If nothing else, it’ll educate the masses about the “Jabber” protocol.
Google does have gobs of cash, and it’s lots of fun seeing what they can […]

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Companies of the world, pay attention. These are your future customers.
Pay attention not just to the fact that they’re online, but what they’re doing and how. Pay attention to how integrated their physical space is with their infospace, and how relational their infospace has become. They bounce between applications, they earn and spend “virtual” […]

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Like so many other great ideas and technologies for the Internet, Flickr emerged from a soup of game thinking. Nice interview with JJG:
adaptive path » an interview with ludicorp’s eric costello

JJG: How much of The Game Neverending would you say is still present in Flickr in its current state?
EC: I think the spirit of it […]

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The original “weblog” was Jorn Barger’s robotwisdom.com. I used to read it every day, and went to about half the links. And that’s about all his blog was for a long while … he used to do small paragraphs, but then finally was posting 15-20 or more links a day with small comments next to […]

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After reading Half-Blood Prince, I was wondering if the word “Horcrux” had any previous etymology, and looked it up on Wikipedia.
Only to discover that it really doesn’t… but that amazingly, less than 24 hours after the release of the new Harry Potter book, there’s a whole entry on the term on Wikipedia. Yet another very […]

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