Online Media Cultist

People used to say (and maybe they still do?) that you can stay up-to-date and fairly well informed of the goings on in the world just by reading all of the stories on the front page of The New York Times each day. Well, in webby world, you can do worse than breezing through TechCrunch to get a quick read on all that’s going on in web land.

Which is helpful as I’ve been very very busy of late. Extraordinary things seem to go on when we’re occupied with other things, isn’t it amazing?

In any event, I’m going to quickly breeze through some of the more fascinating things I came across on TechCrunch while quickly catching up today.

AOL Finds An Obvious Use For WOW.com: A World Of Warcraft Social Network
A bunch of sites have tried to crack the code on getting the enormous worldwide community of the massively popular MMO (massive multiplayer online game) under one online social networking hood, but there’s no clear leader as yet. The key is to give these serious gamers the specific communication tools (which server are you on? When’s the next guild meet-up? Etc.) to give them a reason to use the site to their advantage.

Yahoo Search Just Got Smarter
It’s fun to see search getting multimedia-ish… except for those weird and slightly creepy Ask.com commercials. You know that Google is going to come a-knocking on this door sooner or later.

TechMeme Leaderboard In Context + New Verticals On The Way
I think there’s every chance that Techmeme is going to topple Technorati right over with this one. It’s already the go-to place for up-to-the-minute technology stories and conversations, and the new leaderboard is simply appears to be more relevant and credible than Technorati’s strange and somewhat clunky in-bound links list.

Is Favorit a Digg killer?
I keep talking about Digg needing some serious competition… will Favorit be up to the challenge? It kind of seems more like a feed reader with commenting, with voting/ranking being secondary, but I guess we’ll see!

Joost Officially Launches
Long awaited TV-on-the-Internet play finally goes public. I never quite got swept up in the Joost buzz, but these are the guys who founded Skype, so who am I to argue?

FriendFeed To Aggregate Social Network Data Into A Single Feed
I really like the concept behind FriendFeed (aggregating the activity on your various social networking/bookmarking sites, Facebook-like) and think it has the conceptual stuff to beat out a lot of the competition. As an aggregation-junkie, my hat’s off!

I’ll try to work some of the above into standalone stories over the next few days… if only I can grab some time, and the angry Internet Lordz provide me some connectivity at home!

If you know what MMOPRG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) means, then you almost certainly bow down to the WoW. World of Warcraft, an online role-playing game set in an immersive world replete with guilds, alliances, beasties, and hordes, is built on the engaging concept of completing quests to gain experience and rewards within the game.

So engaging, in fact, that Blizzard Entertainment has announced that World of Warcraft has surpassed eight million subscribers worldwide.

The gaming world is enormous and online and growing and will influence all of the next wave of Internet development, from blogs to social networking to what is referred to in shorthand as MMOs (or massively multiplayer online). The convergence of “gaming” with what we tend to think of as socializing or networking is already happening, and will become much more commonplace in 2007.

All of this really struck home for me around a year ago when I heard an NPR report about gold farming, which just about blew my mind.