Every morning before I start work (and this habit has carried over into my looking-for-work phase) I read a number of blogs and sites about web, gaming, marketing, and so on to stay current with everything. Some of the interesting/amusing things I saw this morning are:
COPPA Kids. This was hilarious, since I received a lot of these on the social networking site that I worked for. My boss was shocked to read the one from a ten year old that called us all “gay pricks” for the site being down that morning. I told him that that kind of language was pretty standard, unfortunately. So were the nude pics the same kid kept trying to post to his profile.
Game Developers Conference 2009: Network Marketing: Leveraging Social. Networks to Grow an MMO. I would dearly love to attend this, as game design applied to social networks has been a very special interest of mine. Part of the work that I did for my last project was to explore and develop the areas where social networking sites intersected with common game/MMO experience. For instance, a site like MySpace or Facebook has a lot of game elements: collecting (friends lists, virtual gifts, vampire bites, whatever), levelling (sites where you gain status by being recommended or rated by other members, fleshing out your profile, etc.). I’ll have to find the spec that I did called “Community as Game” meant to explain this concept to management and developers alike – I put a lot of work and research into it.
And finally, just a bit of cuteness: Foxes on a Trampoline. :D
Work calls…I’m trying to avoid the siren song of EVE until this afternoon.