A very good friend of mine, Duncan Gough, is the developer and co-founder of PMOG - Passively Mutliplayer Online Game, along with Justin Hall and Merci Victoria Grace.  It wa around for a year or so 2006/07, but then vanished from our internets when they got funded by O'Reilly Ventures last August.  But now, it's BACK and in beta stage!  Huzzah!

I'm one of the first lucky beta testers, and so far so good.  It looks very charming with updated graphics, and all the old goodies such as mines and quest setting working well.

"PMOG is an infinite game built on individual network histories, transforming our web surfing into ongoing social play. With a game head-up display in Firefox, players can bomb each other, wage war over web sites, and lead other users on web missions. Ordinary web sites become caches for items and currency. PMOG fuses an MMO into our WWW."  You can read more about PMOG here.

I'm waiting on a quote from the team when they get chance, so check back for updates.

[update - and here we are:]

Duncan Gough says, "PMOG is a lightweight massively casual online game that we hope people will enjoy playing because of its passive nature. It's going to be fun seeing how people play on the internet with the things we've made for them!"

Justin Hall adds, "It's a brain tickle to start to see people participating in a layer  of play on top of the ordinary internet.  All the information we have  access to in the world is fantastic - having friends and strangers  making mischief and magic out of web pages turns out to be a real good time."

So there you go :-)  Best of luck to the Gamelayers team, can't wait to watch it develop.

Venturebeat seems to think so..

Just been chatting to Sam Michel on MSN, and he's sneakily launched a new version of Chinwag.com which I think looks brilliant, a massive improvement and what it has been, and I'm looking forward to getting my Chinwag blog up and running on there.

Question: If you could choose, what would you want me to write about on the Chinwag blog?  And before you shout pornography, gambling, drink and drugs, it will probably have to be something useful for all the Chinwag readers.