Searching...

I signed up with the social bookmarking site Delicious. To be perfectly honest, I think I did it more because of the name than the site itself. However, it does seem to have a very intuitive interface. I was able to search using various tags and see who had bookmarked sites that I was finding. I did like the feature that allows you shows how many results will come up if you add a tag to the one that you are currently searching.

Unfortunately I am still having some difficulty finding interesting blogs or sites in my field of research. To remind my followers, I am looking at examining the various relationships that develop in MMORPGs and in particular World of Warcraft. I am finding many websites related to the game, but they are more focused on game mechanics and strategies rather than academic research. (I know the research is out there. I've read it!) Perhaps the "academic" authors don't like to write in blogs as much, or perhaps I am just having a hard time finding their work.

I have been looking at sites under the tags of World of Warcraft, Social, and Gaming, but I find that most of the results aren't terribly promising. Most sites are just casual posts from players that say they love how World of Warcraft is social, but that's about it. There are some other interesting things that come up, like tutorials on how to make machinima with WoW. That's an interesting subject for me as well because it explores using video games to express ideas in a more film like media. However, this doesn't exactly pertain to my topic of social structures and development of social practices in a virtual world.

I did find a slight trend of sites that try and show how WoW will help you develop skills in the real world. (I've always wondered...) I've seen articles like this before, but I'm not terribly sure that I believe them. It could be interesting however because it is trying to find correlations between face to face interaction with interaction online. Interactions in WoW are different than those found in other types of online social environments, like IMVU or Second Life.

The fact that there are multiple sites that look into this topic might be useful, but overall I still find it very hard to find good source material. Searching World of Warcraft alone as a tag results in things like (http://www.topworldofwarcraftguide.com/world-of-warcraft-gold-farming-guide). Not terribly helpful. Social Media seems to get slightly better results. Unfortunately, I believe that "social media" has become a bit of an overused buzz word and is being thrown around casually.