A real-world MMO has one more advantage: Revenues. The opportunities for sponsorship, or for driving players to real-world locations to make real-world purchases, make Blizzard’s current revenues look tiny by comparison.

I think the Offline world is often overlooked when it comes to Online worlds and social media sites and the fact that it is very impotant to link the On- and Offline worlds together, let them interact.

Some of this is certainly happening with e.g. Facebook, Google, Yahoo! [... you name it] dev events, but why not for “everyone”, the normal user?

On February 10, 2007, the first night of Nine Inch Nails’ European tour, T-shirts went on sale at a 19th-century Lisbon concert hall with what looked to be a printing error: Random letters in the tour schedule on the back seemed slightly boldfaced. Then a 27-year-old Lisbon photographer named Nuno Foros realized that, strung together, the boldface letters spelled “i am trying to believe.” Foros posted a photo of his T-shirt on the Spiral, the Nine Inch Nails fan forum. People started typing “iamtryingtobelieve.com” into their Web browsers. That led them to a site denouncing something called Parepin, a drug apparently introduced into the US water supply. Ostensibly, Parepin was an antidote to bioterror agents, but in reality, the page declared, it was part of a government plot to confuse and sedate citizens. Email sent to the site’s contact link generated a cryptic auto-response: “I’m drinking the water. So should you.” Online, fans worldwide debated what this had to do with Nine Inch Nails. A setup for the next album? Some kind of interactive game? Or what?

A very interesting read and it shows the new ways used by marketeers to deeply involve the target group in the marketing campaign, make them part “of the story”. The TV show LOST is another example of this, combining many different “media channels”, but all using the Internet to integrate all of them.

Do you have other examples? Leave a comment!

So Today I want to take some time for the blog and post a link to the site of Paul Graham.

In these days he runs a VC called YCombinator. He has written now for some time Essays about a lot of topics. Ranging from “Web 2.0″ – “Copy What You Like” – “How to Present to Investors”.

Take a look!