Every since I read My Tiny Life I've been interested in MUDs. There doesn't seem to be any analogue to them in the year 2000, which is a shame. If you think of the way http/WWW has improved on gopher, ICQ/AIM/etc on telnet/talkd, it seems odd we still haven't found any way of improving on the basic MUD client. Mind you, the only single-player adventure game I've seen that's improved on the text-adventure games of the 1980s has been Riven but that's only one game. Six years of development and photo-realistic graphics to feel as good as shitty text-descriptions? The power of words.
So, back to the point: A virtual world for weblogs would be muchos kewl. Imagine the way all the guys at pyra.com would have their rooms close together, and then the way other people would have their weblogs close by to pick up traffic. Now think about using syndicated content from WWW weblogs to feed into the MUD so you can see where people are reading and chat to them about articles. Given the way people love designing their weblogs, giving them an entire world to design around -- the possibilities are intriguing.
I investigated. LambdaMOO seems pretty popular, so I had a look at that. It turns out to be a whole lot more difficult than I thought it would be. I can't imagine how hard it would be to pull RSS off the web and parse it. Hm.
Hm indeed. What I really need is a Perl MUD server because then I can customise it. Hopefully. Or perhaps I should look around for other MUD servers that do what I want. Hm. Hm again. This could be interesting.
Every since I read My Tiny Life I've been interested in MUDs. There doesn't seem to be any analogue to them in the year 2000, which is a shame. If you think of the way http/WWW has improved on gopher, ICQ/AIM/etc on telnet/talkd, it seems odd we still haven't found any way of improving on the basic MUD client. Mind you, the only single-player adventure game I've seen that's improved on the text-adventure games of the 1980s has been Riven but that's only one game. Six years of development and photo-realistic graphics to feel as good as shitty text-descriptions? The power of words.
So, back to the point: A virtual world for weblogs would be muchos kewl. Imagine the way all the guys at pyra.com would have their rooms close together, and then the way other people would have their weblogs close by to pick up traffic. Now think about using syndicated content from WWW weblogs to feed into the MUD so you can see where people are reading and chat to them about articles. Given the way people love designing their weblogs, giving them an entire world to design around -- the possibilities are intriguing.
I investigated. LambdaMOO seems pretty popular, so I had a look at that. It turns out to be a whole lot more difficult than I thought it would be. I can't imagine how hard it would be to pull RSS off the web and parse it. Hm.
Hm indeed. What I really need is a Perl MUD server because then I can customise it. Hopefully. Or perhaps I should look around for other MUD servers that do what I want. Hm. Hm again. This could be interesting.