HIW #15 – Alachia

Finally! After months of scheduling, hope, drama and disapointment, we sit dow with Alachia from Wowcast for a great talk about the game, the meta, and life in general.

Listen to the show:

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You can also use iTunes, the RSS feed or the the MP3 file.

And remember: this is only a re-link! I will post here when we put a show out from now on, but the official How I Wow blog is still at howiwow.org. You’ll find all the previous episodes there, which include amazing guests like Veronica Belmont, Scott Johnson, The Spags, Randy Jordan, Tom Merritt, Curt Schilling and more!

And in case you have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s a short summary of what the show is:

Shawn Coons was bored. He wanted to do a show and talk about World of Warcraft. So that’s what we did, and we never thought it would turn into what it is today: an unmissable collection of talks about what it means to be a gamer today.
In each show we get a notable member of the community to open up and tell us about their experience both inside and outside of the game. From what motivates them in the game to how their families view their gaming habits, with a few digressions about the future of the internet, our society and the world.
If you’re tired of hearing the same old news show over and over again, How I Wow is for you. Good times are contractually guarantied.

Phileas S1 – Islam for dummies

Do you ever get tired of thinking in stereotypes and inaccuracies? I know I do, and my knowledge of Islam certainly is vague… but here’s an idea: how about sitting down with a Muslim and asking him all sorts of candid questions? Simple enough, right? But maybe you don’t have a Muslim right next door to ask him yourself. Well, fear not! The Phileas Club is here to help.

We asked Turki (our resident Saudi panelist) to take us on a tour of the Muslim faith. I also asked Scott (from Utah) to join the discussion and help us ask the best questions we could.
And to make this show even more special we enlisted the help of twitterers around the world, too! Thanks go out to all of those who were kind enough to answer the “instant questions” I asked.

So we hope you’ll learn a thing or two about Islam in this episode (or at least that you’ll have fun listening to Scott and I make fools of ourselves) and we’ll try to bring you more “for dummies” specials in the future.

(And by the way, if you enjoy comics that are made by a dummy, you should go check out Scott’s website.)

Listen to the show:

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You can also use iTunes, the RSS feed or the the MP3 file.

What Twitter needs now.

“Again with Twitter?!”
Yeah I know… Twitter is here, get used to it.

Alright, so what does Twitter need? First one who says “a business model” gets a cookie. Yes, they do need that, but let me take a detour through the user side of things for a moment and I’ll get back to that in a minute.

As I have said before, Twitter’s simplicity is its strength. I don’t think they should give it up for anything. Others have tried to “enhance” the user experience by adding threading and things like that. An interesting idea on paper, but it does take away some of the product’s usability. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a hater; let’s just say it’s different and the crowds seem to be gravitating towards more simplicity.
So Twitter has to stay simple, but there is still room to expand. And I think topical conversations is indeed something that could enhance the user experience tremendously. If done right, and in the spirit of the product.
In comes the #hashtag. We all know that you can use these to specify what topic you are talking about. This is incredibly useful and I strongly believe Twitter should make it its next big push. So to put things clearly:

@notpatrick thinks @twitter should embrace #hashtags and make them the second arm of the community.

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Phileas #9 – Micheal Dell needs more bodyguards

Happy new year! Alright, we went through that part last month already…

2009 does get an awesome start though, with a wonderful Phileas cast:
Turki (Saudi Arabia), Randy (Texas / Canada), Mohammed (Qatar) join me on the show to talk about Gaza, Obama and the religious police, as well as the Dell / Putine incident, ad-sponsored adultery and more!

We all hope you enjoy listening to the show as much as we do recording it, and if you do, please consider leaving a comment on iTunes, which will help give us more visibility.
And if you want to hear more from Randy, you can go to the Warcraft show he hosts.

Listen to the show:

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You can also use iTunes, the RSS feed or the the MP3 file.

Have a great month of february, talk to you in a few weeks.