Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering exhaustively goes through dozens of variations of word balloons and lettering choices in them.

I have often argued that in dealing with chat bubbles in MMOs, we should just steal these conventions, because so many people are familiar with them just by osmosis, even if they are not comics readers (many of these conventions are used in the funny pages too).

We had huge debates on SWG about whether to use “plain chat bubbles” or to invent something that was styled more like Star Wars. Plain won, in the end — and we ended up supporting regular, shout, thought, whisper, musical, caption, and more.

Hasn’t It Always Been About Status? is a little article tracing the status update mania (such as Twitter) to AIM status messages.

I have now spent two days with Twitter, and I have decided that it is basically guild chat in Internet-the-MMO. It’s a form of /grouptell, and we’re all out slaying bookmarks instead of orcs.

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My brother Josh works in politics. He does “new media,” which means that he handles doing viral and Internet marketing of campaigns — not the presidential ones, but downticket ones… like Al Franken’s.

Ars Technica just posted an article about something Josh wrote for Politics which he calls “Long Tail nanotargeting” of marketing messages. I thought both were a great read, and have relevance and applicability well outside of politics.

People don’t go to one place, looking for one thing. Their whims take them to a million places. The trick is to be everywhere, with tightly targeted messages. It’s about showing them highly relevant factoids/ads tailored to the whim they’re currently indulging, which if clicked, will redirect them to a relevant part of your website or related off-site content. In short, long-tail nanotargeting takes those little gems—be it an endorsement, video, news story, or ask—and shows it to the people who would care.

A movie of my keynote at Living Game Worlds IV is up now. You can learn about the weird connections I see between The Old 97, banjos,  copyright lawsuits, pop music, cellphones in Kenya, and molecular biology. Oh, and virtual worlds, of course.

Towards the end, I show a lot of pictures of Metaplace worlds from a few months ago.

There are also lots of presentations and sessions and panels up — I highly recommend the pioneers panel, but honestly, it was a great conference, they were all good.

No promises as to how often I will Tweet anything… I am terrible about Facebook status updates too.

In theory, blog posts are being Tweeted automatically — we’ll see!

We’re doing a lot of community outreach stuff with Metaplace these days — just doing sample key giveaways in different markets, that sort of thing. And Twitter, of course, has rapidly emerged as a significant force as it continues to gain adoption.

5 Steps to Going Viral on Twitter is a pretty nice article giving some advice on how to maximize the chances of ReTweets, based on datamining actual Retweets.

1. Ask! Literally put “please RT” in your Tweet. Or at least some sort of call to action.
2. Good ReTweet time is between 9am and 6pm EST, with the peak 11am and 3pm EST.
3. Peak ReTweet days are Monday through Wednesday.
4. 70% of ReTweets have a link in them.
5. Social validation matters. If you really want something ReTweeted broadly, you want it to be ReTweeted by several people. So contact them directly and ask them to do so.
6. Add value. You need to be providing some solid content.

No, I still don’t have a twitter account, but I am edging closer. But I did go ahead and add a Tweet This link to the bottom of posts here on the blog. So  “please ReTweet” posts.

Chat is never enough.

It should be a truism, but far too many social virtual spaces and even sites have fallen down in this regard.You build a social environment, maybe theme it a little bit, and sit back and expect people to turn it into a vibrant community. But nothing happens. It doesn’t catch fire. It doesn’t ever form the nubbin of a community.

It’s probably a cliche to even bring up pearls. Pearls happen inside oysters and mussels (or at least they used to, before we all got used to artificial ones). They aren’t formed around grains of sand specifically, but rather around irritants of many sorts, usually quite tiny ones. The pearl is a protective mechanism, something that wraps around the irritation. In the wild, this happens very rarely — you have to go through hundreds of oysters to find a pearl, and even then, it might not be much of one. But since the 1920s or so, we have cultured pearls, making them happen on purpose.

In the last long post, I talked about how to make a game world more social. In this post, I want to do the opposite — talk about ways to add the irritant that causes the pearl to form. Social interaction is a pearl of great price, especially in worlds devoted to it; and yet, this pearl does not form easily without prompting. And the prompting often takes the form of an irritant.

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Amazon.com: Game Downloads: Video Games.

Games are priced at around $10. This is the other shoe dropping from their purchase of Reflexive back in October, presumably.

Casual games are a billion-dollar market, so it’s not surprising that a company like Amazon would want a piece of the action.

How the city hurts your brain is a Boston Globe article that has a ton of relevance to the recent post on sociability in online worlds. It is primarily about natural surroundings serving as a  literal, measurable cognitive balm via “attention restoration theory.” It also speaks about the pressures of city life impairing working memory, attention, and even reducing self-control and increasing aggression.

But the density of city life doesn’t just make it harder to focus: It also interferes with our self-control. In that stroll down Newbury, the brain is also assaulted with temptations — caramel lattes, iPods, discounted cashmere sweaters, and high-heeled shoes. Resisting these temptations requires us to flex the prefrontal cortex, a nub of brain just behind the eyes. Unfortunately, this is the same brain area that’s responsible for directed attention, which means that it’s already been depleted from walking around the city. As a result, it’s less able to exert self-control, which means we’re more likely to splurge on the latte and those shoes we don’t really need. While the human brain possesses incredible computational powers, it’s surprisingly easy to short-circuit: all it takes is a hectic city street.

The hothouse effect also increases innovation, the article says — but it does seem like an interesting question for those of us making crowded virtual worlds, particularly ones chock-full of constant stimuli.