Since I’ve talked about it occasionally but never gotten in to a ton of detail, the blogging challenge offers a perfect opportunity to do so. Already, Liam and my brother in law Pete have been dragged in to the clutches of EA…perhaps others will choose to follow as well. And then my dark lord will feed on them and…uhhh…give them respect. And candy.

I found out about it while it was in Closed Beta through…yes…GAMES. One of the people I follow on Twitter is a guy named Tom Ohle. Tom does PR for a lot of gaming companies…Paradox, BioWare, CD Projekt, etc….so that’s why I had started following him. He’s one of the many PR people and web developers who pooled up to start Empire Avenue in the first place. So when he started talking about it, I got curious and decided to sign up for an invite.

Empire Avenue is basically a new social network that lets you buy and sell people. Yes, chatting about video games AND a basic slavery business have finally come together in glorious harmony! It’s like Roots, but without all the nasty stuff and more geeks.

Every person is also a commodity…that badge in the upper left of this blog marked ‘My Worth’ is my stock value on the market. Two things can change your value. The first is trading…being bought and sold affects your share value like a real stock. The second is content. You can plug in blog feeds, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr at the moment, with all of those affecting your share price. You can also plug in other RSS feeds, though the affect of those is negligible at best. So long as you have enough control over a feed to add a verification code to it, it’s fair game. How much content you produce also affects what sort of dividends you give to your investors, so that is the driving force behind someone deciding to ‘keep’ you.

At the same time, it’s also a social network. There are various communities one can join (though you have to reach a value of 14 Eaves…that being EA’s currency…before you can join Private ones). Since everyone’s content is splashed in to their front page feed, you can see what people are in to from that as well. A lot of the people I chat with over Twitter are those who I’ve met through EA, actually…there are plenty of raging rant mongering video game nuts on there. And I’ve noticed a definite uptick in traffic on this here blog since joining, so that’s cool.

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