Read, read, read - how to survive 8727km from Silicon Valley

(CC) Will Lion

The web is an amazing equalizer. It brings everything closer. To be precise 8727km closer (the distance from Helsinki, Finland to Silicon Valley, USA).

Since before I started Everyplay I knew I had to learn a lot, but I never imagined I could learn so much by simply being at my computer and devouring blog posts, following people on Twitter, watching conference videos and tracking hashtags. I’m truly grateful to every conference organizer like Charles Hudson (Virtual Goods conference) or Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis (TechCrunch50) and to every conference presenter, who post their presos, videos and transcripts online. I’m truly grateful to every blogger like Eric Ries, Andrew Chen and Raph Koster, who share their hard earned lessons and insights freely with the world.

If you are geographically-handicapped like me, the best thing you can do is to drink from the fire hydrant. To get you started, here is the list of the 250+ blogs I track. The list gets roughly 400-500 posts per day, so the best thing to do is to just skim the list and read the interesting parts.

The blogs are in a quasi-ranked list of relevance and quality (i.e. I moved the blogs I pay most attention to the top of their respective lists). I’ve bolded a few top selections, that anybody interested in games, startups, virtual goods, and venture capital should follow. If you want to import a whole bunch of these feeds, feel free to grab my OPML file (you can import it to e.g. Google Reader)

Game design

• [RSS] Raph’s Website (Raph Koster, brilliant designer and thought leader for MMOs, founder of Metaplace)
• [RSS] Avant Game (Jane McGonigal is one of the thought leaders in using games outside of games)
• [RSS] Lost Garden (Daniel Cook is a very prominent game designer, great articles e.g. on Funware)
• [RSS] Zen of Design (Damien Schubert is a very prominent game designer, highly experienced on MMOs)
• [RSS] DESIGNER NOTES (Soren Johnson, designer at Firaxis for e.g. Civilization)
• [RSS] musings of a social architect (Amy Jo Kim’s blog, CEO of Shufflebrain, game & community designer)
• [RSS] Sulka’s Game (Sulka Haro, lead designer of Habbo)
• [RSS] frans goes blog (Personal blog of Frans Mäyrä, professor at Hypermedia lab, academic perspective)
• [RSS] The Funware Blog @ rmbr (Gabe Zichermann’s blog, not very active anymore, used to be about Funware)
• [RSS] Broken Toys (Scott Jennings, formerly of NCSoft, now in a top secret online games startup)

Online games, virtual worlds

• [RSS] Virtual Worlds News (top source of VW news)
• [RSS] Inside Social Games (top source of social games news)
• [RSS] Worlds In Motion (Gamasutra’s sister site focused on online games, in depth articles)
• [RSS] Kzero (great research on Virtual Worlds)
• [RSS] +8* | Plus Eight Star (great research and analysis, focused on Asia)
• [RSS] Virtual Economy Research Network (best research of virtual economies, from Helsinki Institute of Information Technology)
• [RSS] Bret on Social Games (Bret Terrill’s blog, superb archive on social games, no longer updated)
• [RSS] PlayNoEvil Game Security News & Analysis (read this blog to avoid getting your game pwned)
• [RSS] Terra Nova (the blog for virtual worlds, great archive, academic)
• [RSS] The Forge (Matt Mihaly’s blog, MUD veteran, virtual goods pioneer)
• [RSS] Erik Bethke and The World of GoPets (Erik Bethke, founder of GoPets, mix of professional & personal, great articles in archive)
• [RSS] DPerry.com (David Perry, prominent game designer, entrepreneur now focused on online, F2P games)
• [RSS] ICO Partners (insightful articles from MMO veterans, European focus)
• [RSS] Metaplace.com Developer’s Blog (Official blog for Metaplace, pioneering MMO/online game building)
• [RSS] Life at Playfish (Playfish’ official blog)
• [RSS] Zynga Blog (Zynga’s official blog)
• [RSS] SGN Developer Blog (Social Gaming Network’s official blog)
• [RSS] Media Shifters (great new blog on social games)
• [RSS] shufflebrain (Official blog for Shufflebrain, makers of Photograb)
• [RSS] Caleb Booker (great roundups of virtual world news)
• [RSS] Second Tense (Hiro Pendragon’s blog, in-depth articles on MMOs)
• [RSS] Dogster Inc. Company Blog
• [RSS] MoiPal Blog (official blog for MoiPal, mobile virtual world)
• [RSS] MMPOW / Published News (MMO news)
• [RSS] the Zong blog (mobile payment processor)
• [RSS] Payment Guy – “Everyone can pay!” (controversial, sometimes over top claims on certain topics, but still strangely interesting stuff on payments)
• [RSS] Ministry of Game (fan blog for social games)
• [RSS] eightbar (virtual worlds blog, former IBM evangelist, often Second Life related content)
• [RSS] Mark Pincus Blog (Mark is the CEO of Zynga, mostly personal stuff but sometimes also Zynga news)
• [RSS] From The Chief Technical Monkey (CTO of Rebel Monkey, a virtual world/casual MMO for tweens and teens)
• [RSS] Mathieu Nouzareth’s Blog (founder of Cafe.com, a social games outfit)
• [RSS] GAMES | Roman Nouzareth | Boonty | CAFE.COM (co-founder of Cafe.com, a social games outfit)
• [RSS] PlayOn (Xerox PARC’s blog on virtual worlds)
• [RSS] Virtually Blind | Virtual Law (virtual world & law)
• [RSS] Andrew Wooldridge Dot Com
• [RSS] Conduit Labs Blog for Input (official blog of Conduit Labs, makers of Loudcrowd)
• [RSS] Economics of Virtual Worlds
• [RSS] Virtual Greats
• [RSS] Virtual Worlds Forum Blog
• [RSS] Scott Hartsman – Off the Record
• [RSS] We Can Fix That with Data (MMO design)
• [RSS] Virtual Cultures
• [RSS] Sharendipitous Moments (Sharendipity’s official blog, a game building toolkit)
• [RSS] PlayCrafter’s blog (Playcrafter’s official blog, a game building toolkit)

Virtual goods

• [RSS] Virtual Goods News (best news source on virtual goods)
• [RSS] SharkJumping (Sean Ryan’s blog, CEO of Meez, on board of Twofish, knowledgeable entrepreneur, pioneer of virtual goods in USA)
• [RSS] Virtual Goods Insider (great blog on virtual goods, not updated too often though)
• [RSS] The Offerpal Media Blog (Offerpal is a CPA provider, corporate stuff but also HOW-TO articles)
• [RSS] SnipClip. Paid content is back. (German startup working with virtual goods)
• [RSS] Freemium (all things Freemium – not focused on virtual goods, but very relevant)
• [RSS] Free To Play (used to be great blog for virtual goods, but Adrian Crook hasn’t updated it in a while, great archive)

Game industry general

• [RSS] A Tree Falling in the Forest (Keith Boesky is a former CEO of Eidos USA, insightful blogger)
• [RSS] T=Machine (Adam Martin’s great blog, opionated & insightful – love it!)
• [RSS] GamesIndustry.biz (very good site covering the business side of games)
• [RSS] Bruce On Games (hailing from UK, Bruce has sharp commentary backed by more than a decade as game marketing exec)
• [RSS] FingerGaming (latest on iPhone games)
• [RSS] Gamasutra Feature Articles (Gamasutra is the top resource for “traditional” game developers on the actual development of games)
• [RSS] GameDaily News Feed (good up to date feed on what’s going on)
• [RSS] GameDaily BIZ Features Feed (same, but for business news)
• [RSS] Next Generation (great game development site, often featuring articles from EDGE, the best print game mag)
• [RSS] Jay is Games (great indie & casual game reviews)
• [RSS] DFC Intelligence (DFC is the one game industry research organization I tend to trust on their forecasts)
• [RSS] bizpunk (games & business)
• [RSS] TechSoup (Sonja’s blog on all things game)
• [RSS] Jim on Web Games
• [RSS] Business & Games: The Blog
• [RSS] Game Matters (Scott Miller of 3DRealms)
• [RSS] Level Up (N’Gai Croals blog for Newsweek, probably no longer updated as he’s moved on. Archive is great!)
• [RSS] kevin’s blog
• [RSS] ZenAndGames.com

Entrepreneurs & entrepreneurship, startups

• [RSS] Lessons Learned (the best blog for any tech startup)
• [RSS] Futuristic Play by @Andrew_Chen (the best blog for any online startup)
• [RSS] Master of 500 Hats (Dave McClure a.k.a Master of 500 hats, opionated, insightful & colorful language = great stuff)
• [RSS] blog.pmarca.com (Marc Andresseen, the blog archive is solid gold)
• [RSS] Arctic Startup (Best blog about Scandinavian startups)
• [RSS] OnStartups (Darmesh Shah’s great blog on startups)
• [RSS] Sachin Rekhi’s Blog (great blog with practical posts on social media, monetization)
• [RSS] Charles Hudson’s Weblog(Charles Hudson works organizes e.g. the Virtual Goods summit)
• [RSS] charleshudson’s shared items in Google Reader (Charles Hudson works organizes e.g. the Virtual Goods summit)
• [RSS] Hacker News (always a great source on what’s going on for hacker startups)
• [RSS] SKMurphy (SK Murphy’s blog, follow for customer development process related posts)
• [RSS] Tane.li (Taneli Tikka’s blog, one of most vocal Finnish serial entrepreneurs, on our advisory board)
• [RSS] zengestrom.com (Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku)
• [RSS] StartupCFO (excellent posts on financial aspects of startups)
• [RSS] Startup Marketing Blog – by Sean Ellis (good marketing posts)
• [RSS] blog maverick (Marc Cuban, entertaining & provocative)
• [RSS] Loic Le Meur Blog (the European in Silicon Valley)
• [RSS] You’ve gotta be kidding me (Max Levchin, co-founder of Paypal and Slide)
• [RSS] traction matters… (good stuff on startups)
• [RSS] Jason Nazar’s Blog (CEO and co-founder of DocStoc)
• [RSS] Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing (investor perspective)
• [RSS] Startonomics (blog for the Startonomics conference)
• [RSS] Noam Wasserman’s “Founder Frustrations” blog
• [RSS] Emerging Enterprise Center Blog
• [RSS] Inspired Startup
• [RSS] Startupbin (Finnish angle)
• [RSS] Asmo Halinen (co-founder of Apaja Online Entertainment, now CEO at OneDidIt)
• [RSS] Fishpool (Osma Ahvelampi, CTO of Sulake (makers of Habbo))
• [RSS] James Hong (of HotOrNot fame)
• [RSS] tippingeurope (Ville Vesterinen, lead dude behind Arctic Startup)
• [RSS] Quick Sprout (Neil Patel of KISSmetrics)
• [RSS] brinking – nabeel hyatt (Nabeel Hyatt’s blog, founder of Conduit Labs)
• [RSS] Riverture …
• [RSS] Bill Joos’ Tips from the Trenches (I only wish Bill would actually blog, so I’ve subscribed to this at the off chance he starts again, because he is one of the smarkest folks I’ve ever met)
• [RSS] Infectious (startup marketing and more from Sean O’Malley)
• [RSS] Laserlike
• [RSS] Cerdafied – Startups, People & the Variety Hour (Michael Cerda of CC:betty)
• [RSS] collapsing geography (Cory Ondrejka, co-founder of Linden Labs, now SVP at EMI Music)
• [RSS] ScreditCrunch (official blog of Scred, Finnish group/micro-finance startup)
• [RSS] ideasonideas (Eric Karjaluoto’s blog)
• [RSS] Dirty Aura (Teemu Aura, ex-Jaiku developer)
• [RSS] The Startup Lawyer
• [RSS] Tech, Startups, Capital, Ideas.
• [RSS] Technology Startup Law BLOG
• [RSS] Tony Wright dot com
• [RSS] Texas Startup Blog
• [RSS] Start Up Blog
• [RSS] Startable
• [RSS] Startup Blog Network
• [RSS] Startup Company Lawyer
• [RSS] Startup Toolbox
• [RSS] Startupping Blog
• [RSS] ScottDig
• [RSS] The Startup Journey
• [RSS] Bill Flagg
• [RSS] Startup Developers Gathering
• [RSS] Ada Chen’s Weblog
• [RSS] Ahtisaari (Marko Ahtisaari, CEO of Dopplr)
• [RSS] Seattle 2.0
• [RSS] Silicon Valley Blog
• [RSS] Joseph Ansanelli
• [RSS] Nick’s Blog
• [RSS] Simply Albert (Albert Lai of Kontagent)
• [RSS] pearltrees (Swiss startup)
• [RSS] Nonsense! (From the founders of Stardoll)
• [RSS] Web Startup Help
• [RSS] Ustrategy
• [RSS] Biz Crusader

Venture Capital

• [RSS] Venture Hacks (the best blog on how to “hack” venture capital – must read)
• [RSS] Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog (superb articles, a lot of them on virtual goods & games, often from Jeremy Liew, one of the managing directors at LSVP)
• [RSS] A VC (Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, great blog)
• [RSS] Altgate (Furqan Nazeeri’s blog, one of the best blogs on VC from entrepreneur’s point of view)
• [RSS] Ask The VC (Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson of the Foundry group, great blog)
• [RSS] How to Change the World (Guy Kawasaki’s blog, excellent blog archive)
• [RSS] Get Venture by Mark Peter Davis (good advice, short and sweet posts)
• [RSS] The Equity Kicker (Nic Brisbourner of DFJ Esprit, good posts & often, European perspective)
• [RSS] VCMike’s Blog (good stuff)
• [RSS] The Riskmaster (Tim Draper of DFJ)
• [RSS] Feld Thoughts (Brad Feld’s personal blog)
• [RSS] TVC Points-of-view (contrarian VC opinions & insights, good stuff)
• [RSS] BarshBits (Steve Barsh, great articles)
• [RSS] alarm:clock (keep up to date with VC deals)
• [RSS] alarm:clock euro (same, but for Europe)
• [RSS] Morten Lund – It’s all about luck (Morten Lund, angel investor e.g. in Skype, a blog from the heart)
• [RSS] Fred Destin (Fred Destin of Atlas Ventures (France))
• [RSS] Redeye VC (good posts)
• [RSS] Unstructured Thoughts by Taylor Davidson
• [RSS] True Ventures
• [RSS] localglo.be (Saul Klein, partner at Index Ventures)
• [RSS] abovethecrowd.com (Bill Gurley of Benchmark)
• [RSS] Who Has Time For This?
• [RSS] Seeing Both Sides
• [RSS] The Accelerator Group (TAG) (British top VCs, Seedcamp backers)
• [RSS] Jeff Clavier’s Software Only (Jeff Clavier of Softtech VC)
• [RSS] Altos Ventures Musings
• [RSS] Felicis Ventures Blog
• [RSS] EarlyStageVC
• [RSS] BeyondVC
• [RSS] Brian Feinstein (of Bessemer Venture Partners)
• [RSS] WSJ.com: Venture Capital Dispatch
• [RSS] iFundVC (Sequioa iFund’s blog)
• [RSS] Southeast VC
• [RSS] HighContrast
• [RSS] VC Confidential
• [RSS] VC Perspectives
• [RSS] VCball
• [RSS] Susan Wu – Venture Capital (Susan used to be at CRV, now entrepreneur at Ohai, a great blog archive for especially virtual goods)
• [RSS] Venture Capital
• [RSS] McInblog
• [RSS] The coffee shops of Mayfair:
• [RSS] Venture Chronicles
• [RSS] Venture Explorer
• [RSS] Video Games and Venture
• [RSS] VentureBlog
• [RSS] Video Game Venture Capital – VGVC
• [RSS] Soaring on Ridgelift
• [RSS] Going Private

Web 2.0, social media

• [RSS] Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik (the best blog on analytics & metrics)
• [RSS] Web Strategy by Jeremiah (analyst at Forrester, cutting edge insights on social media)
• [RSS] O’Reilly Radar – Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies (the latest from O’Reilly, always very insightful)
• [RSS] KISSmetrics Blog (great blog on analytics for social media)
• [RSS] Kevin Hillstrom’s MineThatData (hard core analytics)
• [RSS] JayWeintraub.com – Internet Advertising Analysis and Commentary (more hard core analytics)
• [RSS] Joi Ito’s Web (Joi Ito of Creative Commons, angel investor)
• [RSS] Lookery Blog (official blog for Lookery)
• [RSS] Signal vs. Noise (37Signal’s official blog)
• [RSS] Mixergy.com (great interviews)
• [RSS] The Kontagent Blog (great analytics for social media apps)
• [RSS] Bokardo – Social Design by Joshua Porter (on designing social media services)
• [RSS] SMC:posts (syndicated feed on all thing social media)
• [RSS] The Altimeter by Charlene Li (author of the Groundswell, social media)
• [RSS] Noah Kagan’s Okdork.com
• [RSS] Henrik Torstensson’s Weblog (Swedish perspective on the latest & greatest going on the web startups)
• [RSS] Life With Alacrity (good, in-depth articles)
• [RSS] innonate
• [RSS] Future Exploration Network (futurist research, social media research)
• [RSS] Information Arbitrage
• [RSS] Conversion Rate Experts
• [RSS] Conversion Rate Optimization
• [RSS] This is going to be BIG.
• [RSS] Web2List
• [RSS] SomBiz (aggregator of Finnish social media/web 2.0 blogs)
• [RSS] The Social Software Weblog
• [RSS] The Social Times
• [RSS] Facebook Developers News Feed (well, naturally you need to subscribe to the source =))
• [RSS] Building Web 2.0 Reputation Systems: The Blog (from Yahoo’s team behind their great Reputation System’s library)
• [RSS] bub.blicio.us
• [RSS] ValveBlog (official blog of Valve, Finnish digital marketing firm)
• [RSS] Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog
• [RSS] Clickable Culture
• [RSS] Quintura blog
• [RSS] Best Engaging Communities
• [RSS] Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy

Flash game tech

• [RSS] Alternativa Game blog (one of the best Flash 3D engines, closed source though)
• [RSS] ProgrammableWeb (best resource of mashups)
• [RSS] RockOnFlash \m/ :: John Grden (keep up to date what’s going on with Papervision 3D)
• [RSS] UnitZeroOne (another cutting edge Flash blog)
• [RSS] Technoracle (a.k.a. “Duane’s World”) (blog for Flash evangelist)

Professional blogs

• [RSS] VentureBeat
• [RSS] TechCrunch
• [RSS] ReadWriteWeb
• [RSS] Inside Facebook
• [RSS] All Facebook
• [RSS] Mashable!
• [RSS] GigaOM
• [RSS] paidContent.org
• [RSS] TechCrunch UK
• [RSS] Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger
• [RSS] CenterNetworks
• [RSS] TheNextWeb.org
• [RSS] Download Squad

Misc

• [RSS] Presentation Zen (Garr Reynold’s outstanding blog on presentations and presenting)
• [RSS] Seth’s Blog (Seth Godin, marketing guru & author, always insightful and thrill to read)
• [RSS] Slideshows by User: garr (Garr’s presentations)
• [RSS] Slides that stick (good, practical tips)
• [RSS] Slideshows Most Favorited Today (follow to see outstanding presos)
• [RSS] Ypulse (stay tuned to what Gen Y thinks)
• [RSS] Copyblogger (learn how to blog better =))
• [RSS] The Long Tail (Chris Anderson’s blog for the book by the same name)
• [RSS] Six Pixels of Separation – Marketing and Communications Insights Blog and Podcast – By Mitch Joel at Twist Image
• [RSS] advertising/design goodness – advertising and design blog (for design inspiration)
• [RSS] MarketingCharts
• [RSS] John Ndege.com
• [RSS] Vex Appeal
• [RSS] Burnham’s Beat

Did you find the list useful? Am I missing a blog that an online games entrepreneur should definitely follow? Please shout out in the comments!

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