As Offworld lifts off over the coming weeks and months, I'll be bringing to it a focus on the overlooked, the underappreciated, the rise of the independents and, in general, the games that are bringing genuine excitement and innovation (in both gameplay and design) to the industry.

Offworld will also be home to a number of guest appearances by and regular features from people outside the games industry proper and those that have had only marginal influence but deserve more, because it's when those influences come in that the results have been some of the most magical and memorable, from illustrator Rodney Alan Greenblat and Masaya Matsuura's unforgettable Parappa the Rapper (the face that would launch the rhythm gaming genre proving so profitable today), to studio artist Toshio Iwai's musical Electroplankton, to Keita Takahashi's Katamari Damacy.

That's not to say that Offworld won't also be exploring and featuring gaming's blockbusters, powerhouses and the history of its respected decades-old institutions, but in general we hope to chase away a lot of the industry's cynicism and myopia that's set in and bring the joy of discovery and a fresh breath of playfulness and wonder back, because we're all in this to have fun, aren't we?

"Our growing network of sites - starting with the incredibly successful launch of DVICE.COM and continuing next with gaming -- is designed to tap into our audience's insatiable appetite for technology, games and entertainment," Craig Engler, Senior Vice President of SCIFI.COM told SFcrowsnest.com. "Our young, online demographic wants to be entertained as well as informed, and our new blog-style sites will do just that. On the entertainment side we'll also have online original series, webisodes tied to our hit shows, a new casual game center, all kinds of streaming videos and much more that hits our key demo and grows our core audience."

Powered by SCI FI and launching mid-April, their game site is the newest extension of the SCI FI brand and its growing portfolio of digital assets. The blog-style site will be a hub for reports on all things relevant to the gamer lifestyle. With multiple daily posts from an in-the-know roster of contributors, game players and reviewers, the site covers the best and newest games, reports and industry news plus spotlights on game players and their strategies.

PlayStation.Blog is a bit of work in progress, we see it as a place where we can share with you our company's collective insights, opinions and perspectives on all things related to SCEA, PlayStation and the industry we play in.

At the moment, we're thinking about sharing all sorts of things here, ranging from product news and title announcements to developer updates and industry opinion posts - all of which will come straight from the people here inside SCEA who are working, thinking and playing with this stuff every day. Look to the categories on the sidebar for some initial thoughts we have on future post themes.

Now, what we've learned, perhaps the hard way, is that a blog like this is really about you and the things you want to hear, share and discuss with us. With that in mind, you'll notice that comments are enabled - and encouraged - so tell us what you want to see here and we'll do our best to make it happen. And yes, like most blogs, we have a comment policy, please just keep this in mind when you're leaving a comment.

We imagine it may take us a short while to find our pace with this, but bear with us as we get underway and we promise we'll quickly make this blog a valuable stop in your daily info hunt for PlayStation news.

First off, I am not a Second Life hater. Let me say that again: I am not a Second Life hater. I'm on record as saying that there's something important going on inside the game.

That said, I've been bemused by the amount of hype and attention the game...er...virtual world thingee has received over the past three months. The media has been on SL like white on rice. I've only written about SL a couple of times on this site, but I've probably received five enquiries from sundry Canadian news outlets asking if I played, or knew anybody who played, or knew anybody who was making a six figure income from playing, and so forth.

I haven't seen the service but Fanning explained it to me this way: Using an add on or a software download, Rupture taps into the game to automatically pull together character names, profiles, and resources, and publish them on a personalized site. Rupture will also pull together stats to create individual and guild rankings and provide a place for guilds to organize their playing. As Rupture tracks each member's playing over time, these personalized profiles evolve. And players will be able to chat in groups or with other individuals and download other addons and game demos.

Share information with online friends and guild members.

Find people to play with on your server

Connect on a more personal level by viewing photos of other warcraft players

Look up the jerk who just ganked you.

The bigger question, of course, is whether virtual worlds need social networks - aren't they social enough already? It's tempting to say that Warcraft users might not be crazy about MySpace-style sites, but that doesn’t appear to be the case: WoW's MySpace page has over 100,000 friends and some excellent tools to customize your profile. There are also plenty of popular forums related to MMOGs, so there’s an outside chance a social network could work.

"Please remember to check out my site!" she said, writing down her name on trade show pamphlets.

Hoshikawa's agency, Style Corp., would pay for her blogging operation once she could show them she had a good following of admirers, she said.

"I need more fans, so I can get more gigs, and someday become a race queen," she said.

She declined to say how much she was paid, but said the top companions get more job offers from the big electronics companies and earn four to five times as much per gig.

For fans like Tatebayashi, the "companions" posing next to some of Japan's most technologically advanced gear are far from gratuitous.

The mini-skirted women are the reason he took the afternoon off work and, his best cameras in tow, trekked out during a typhoon to the convention center, a two-hour train ride from his home in western Tokyo.

"It's a long-term investment," he said. "Plus, maybe some of them will become my friends."

Want to read the latest gaming news on your Xbox 360 (like Gaming Bits!)? XB Stream is a new application that works with Windows XP/Vista as a RSS/XML news aggregator to show gaming news and play podcasts on your Xbox 360. It takes news feeds (text and images) and converts it to images that are viewable on the Xbox 360's pictures folder or podcasts and places them in your audio folder on the Xbox 360.

Even though most enthusiast press regulars read the top videogame blogs, it's a scary thought for many of us that someone who is currently sitting in their living room could challenge us for reader mindshare, credibility and eventually even impact our mighty bottom line.

The entry barriers to the enthusiast press are as low today as they've ever been. Gamers have their pick between a vast array of free blog publishing services. These services give anyone with a passion and a keyboard a crack at self-publishing.

However, as multitudes of would-be media giants have discovered, just being able to publish doesn't mean that anyone will actually read what you've written. In fact, because self-publishing is so easy and so cheap it has become insanely difficult to start from scratch and to grow a blog to the point of being a major player. It's difficult but not impossible.

The best voice for any blog is a voice that actually taps into the writer's core personality. Yes, there can be an exaggeration of certain traits and emphasis on core viewpoints, but readers can spot dramatized viewpoints from a mile away. Judging from the top blogs, readers are drawn to genuine viewpoints, no matter how controversial.

In order to avoid the blandness that anchors many blogs, one must be sure that every single post is purposely written in the style and voice that's carried through the entire blog. Even if the blog has several writers, each one must carry their voice into each post.

Read, read, read, and read some more. The better informed you are, the more information you'll be able to convey to your readers.

XuQa, one of the me-too social networks started post-MySpace acquisition, relaunched today, turning its admittedly raunchy site into one big game. Well, a big contest actually!

XuQa members-there are currently about 800,000-play for "peanuts" by adding friends, uploading pictures, winning in one of the sites' poker rooms, watching ads, et cetera...then spend the peanuts on in-game items.

They're not your typical perks–you can buy the ability to see who's viewed your profile, or pay to spike the drink of a poker rival to inhibit his card-playing skills. Active users move through ten levels, for the ultimate prize of exposure on the XuQa home page and $1000 cash. Four testers are already at level 9.

"hey everyone! there's been a power outage in our data center. we're in the process of fixing it right now, so sit tight. -Tom"

But seriously, it is hard to believe that a service this large could just have one data center. Have they not heard of redundancy? I am pretty sure there is more to the story. One can only imagine how millions of MySpace users feel right now.

It's pretty significant when such a massive site goes down for an extended period of time - can you imagine what would happen if Google, or even Yahoo, went offline for hours at a time? (In fact, I remember the outcry in May 2005 when Google suffered a DNS error, resulting in speculation that it had been hacked). With MySpace, however, it's almost expected: users regularly see errors and the code is notoriously poor. It's not clear whether this current downtime is caused by the power problem, or something else. I know a few people who are hoping it stays this way.

"You can't just have a blog on Friendster or MySpace and say you're blogging about games," says John Fowler, an E3 spokesman. E3, which ended Friday, is this city's biggest annual convention, drawing 60,000 participants from around the world, including game publishers and developers, retailers and media folk -- many of whom are bloggers. To be credentialed as a blogger, one needs a business card, a business license for the blog and proof that you've been blogging for more than a month. That means everyone here has a business card, no matter how flimsy it is. Many of the bloggers have outside jobs -- a security guard at a New Jersey casino, an 18-year veteran in the Canadian Army, an event organizer for a Buddhist foundation. They don't claim to be journalists, because they think being a blogger, quite frankly, is better. ("It's journalism without the rules. It's more opinionated," says Kyle Orland, who runs the Video Game Media Watch on VGMWatch.com.) Many do it for free, and the battle to break a story about a game or score an exclusive interview with a game designer is fierce, though entirely virtual. "It's hyper-competitive, but it's not nasty," Bulaong says of her blog's competition with Joystiq.com. Kotaku.com, owned by Gawker Media, has 10 bloggers here. Joystiq.com, an AOL subsidiary, has nine. E3 provides a year's worth of material. Last Tuesday, on the eve of E3, Joystiq.com had more than 1 million page views, says James Ransom-Wiley, a 24-year-old contributing editor. So far this month, Kotaku.com has had 2.8 million page views, says Brian D. Crecente, its 35-year-old editor, compared with 5 million in all of April.

So Hoffman, then 23, poured out her frustration -- under the pen name EA Spouse -- in a November 2004 blog that resonated so strongly with other video game developers that it helped spark an employee uprising inside EA and several of six lawsuits for unpaid overtime against three of the industry's most prominent employers.

Hoffman wrote on her blog that EA's attitude toward its workers was: ``If they don't want to sacrifice their lives and their health and their talent so that a multibillion-dollar corporation can continue its Godzilla-stomp through the game industry, they can work someplace else.''

Now, more than a year later, game developers have won settlements in three class-action lawsuits alleging EA created exhausting work schedules without paying overtime, and successfully pressed employers to ease unrelenting workloads. And EA Spouse, whose true identity has been cloaked until now, is becoming a voice against America's culture of overwork.

``We had received so many excuses, and they had done so much overtime and everyone was so tired,'' Hoffman said. She told her fiance, ``I need to write something about this. It's not right.''

The word comes from reputable US mag, Playstation Magazine, which says Sony is planning an advanced PS3 "lifestyle server" that'll let friends tap into your multimedia diary even when your machine’s switched off.

A big feature of this will be your video blogs, which you'll record on an Eyetoy camera, mix with shots from your camera-equipped PSP, and load up to the Playstation Network Platform.

Sound geeky enough yet? That's not the half of it. As a dangerously obsessed gamer, you'll also want to leave mates snippets of your gaming life through in-game highlights and access to your rankings, along with messages organising your next team battle.

Official confirmation of these extras is expected to come in Sony's speech in Sony's pre-E3 conference speech on May 8th, along with a better idea of the console's price.

The idea for this geeky theme came a few months ago when someone known as ZF from Littleoslo posted a funny remake of the Monopoly board with properties like Google, Yahoo, Flickr etc. Popular IMs took there the roles of what was previously known as rail stations while Wikipedia and Creative Commons became the public utilities. For a geek like me, there was no better theme for a Monopoly-like game that I planned to add (even Ghettopoly couldn't compare).