For those who want to know more about MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) or MMOs for short, Wagner James Au, who has been an “embedded reporter” in the Second Life game since 2003 has written a fascinating account called Taking New World Notes which explains some of the background, is peppered with interesting statistics and offers some examples of how these worlds are already evolving into more than games. Well worth a read.

Paid Content reports on a $50m campaign by US newspapers (coming on top of a $40m magazine campaign) which tries to convince people that they still have a future. Rafat says the money (or even a fraction of it) would be better spent in experiments in new media.

The Centre for Citizen Media reports that South Korean citizen journalism site OhmyNews has received an investment of $11m from Japanese investment firm Softbank. This is said to be related to plans to move outside South Korea.

“A Blog Doesn’t Need a Clever Name” reports on a new service called Blogburst which has set up to syndicate blog content to mainstream media companies. The Washington Post and Houston Chronicle are among the first publishers to sign up.

Nativetext is a new service (currently in beta) which promises to translate any blog feed into multiple foreign languages for onward syndication. The translation is done by humans, apparently, and is free. You can sign up to be notified when public accounts are available.

The Chicago Tribune weighs in with a newbie’s guide to feeds on Bloglines. The step-by-step approach is easy to follow for those who have yet to experience the delights of RSS.

Jeff Jarvis writes about the pros and cons of community.

I’ve just finished reading Freakonomics by Steven Levitt (with a little help from friend and New Yorker scribbler Stephen J Dubner) and I really enjoyed it. The book starts with a warning that it doesn’t have a central theme (read: rambles a bit) and that was certainly true. However, the central premise – that using economists’ tools to analyse all sorts of data yields interesting and sometimes surprising results – holds water. It’s a very good read and I can highly recommend it even if it does lose a bit of steam towards the end.

Macrovision has bought eMeta, the access and entitlements company, for $35m according to PaidContent.org. According to the post the company is interested in incorporating the technology into its solution for games, video, music and enterprise software. The company was born out of an Elsevier project to develop a&e for the science sites and todate appeared to view its market as other publishers. Is this ambition now dead, I wonder?

Kent Newsome has some tips for bloggers based on an earlier post by Scoble.