Warcraft's Azeroth Gets Blogged

The international blog site Metroblogging has added Azeroth, a fictional territory in the world of the online role-playing game World of Warcraft, to its list of 45 real cities from around the world. This is the first "virtual city" listed on Metroblogging and could be the beginning of a whole new niche of blogging that Boingboing.net facetiously called "MMORPBLOGGING."

Metroblogging co-founder Sean Bonner told SCI FI Wire that the Azeroth blog is different from other Warcraft blogs because writers "living in the city" are posting information related to life in Azeroth itself, versus the news commonly found on most other Warcraft blogs.

"Since we use WoW so much like a physical place, we wanted to see if talking about something virtual—as opposed to a physical city, like the other blogs—would work," Bonner said in an interview. "WoW is really a space where people go and hang out and 'live,' so to speak. Our approach to the Azeroth blog is the same [as] with other cities on Metroblogging. It's a bunch of people who live in the city talking about life in that city. And instead of reporting that Blizzard's going to release this patch or that macro, like the 20 or 30 blog sites out there now, this is more about the people playing the game and treating it like a place, rather than a game that's being played."

The Azeroth blog was launched on April 14 and has since grown in content and traffic by the day. The site receives on average 5,000 hits per day and is updated regularly with new content, such as a recently added glossary of commonly used words.

Bonner and his co-founding friend, Jason Defillippo, launched Metroblogging in November 2003 with the Los Angeles blog. Since then, Metroblogging has expanded to cover cities around the world, including Istanbul, Tokyo and cities in Pakistan, as well as most major American cities.

"There's already tons of blogs for every game," Bonner said. "They're usually news-type sites or blogs reporting on the game itself. There's even role-playing blogs, where people are blogging as their character in specific cities in games. But we didn't want to take that approach, either."
Sci Fi Wire -- The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel