Webware

Longtime gamers "Bello" and "Merca" were married this past December in Artix Entertainment's massively multiplayer online role-playing game AdventureQuest Worlds, the company reported Monday. The bride and groom have been avid MMORPG gamers for three years and met each other while playing the game. The wedding was held in a private, in-game room and 11,000 avatars were on hand to witness the exchange of vows.

Unfortunately, the wedding was raided by Troll Wedding Crashers, a clan within the game that "camped out on the dance floor of the reception area."

Low-cost pocket video camcorders have enjoyed a resurgence in sales, thanks to Web 2.0, reveals a report from research firm Futuresource. According to the findings, pocket video camcorders represented less than 5 percent of total camcorder sales in the U.S. and Western Europe in 2006, but that number could swell to 40 percent by 2010, thanks to sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Viddler, and others that make it easy for consumers to upload captured video online.

Online research firm eMarketer released a study Monday claiming small businesses plan to increase ad spending on social-network marketing during 2009. According to the study, 25 percent of all the small businesses surveyed claim they will increase social network ad efforts throughout the year. Twenty-two percent of companies said they plan to increase e-mail ad spending during 2009, while 13 percent of respondents claim they will increase spending on e-commerce sites. The full report can be viewed on eMarketer's site.

An online retailer that allows users to sell goods by providing a 240-character description of the product, has decided to rename its service from Twee Bay to Tweba. According to the company's site, which is basically a Twitter for e-commerce, "some people" asked the service to rename the site and, to no one's surprise, it did just that. The company's founder won't say who asked for the name change, but you can bet they probably worked for a company that has a name that rhymes with Twee Bay.

Balderton Capital, a U.K.-based venture capitalist, announced Monday that it has launched a new fund worth $430 million to invest in new technology and media start-ups. That said, the company told TechCrunch UK in an interview that it would "invest mainly in early stage" firms, but it might "also look at later stage companies."

I'm a smidgen skeptical of this rumor, if only because it seems so darn obvious: TechCrunch reported on Tuesday morning that Time Warner's AOL may have found a use for its Wow.com domain, which it acquired in 1998 as part of the offal of what had once been CompuServe.

The source's big scoop? Wow.com has been transferred to the AOL Games division and will become a World of Warcraft social network. If this turns out to be true, expect plenty of level-28 half-elf mages to be typing "Wow.com" into their browsers soon.

It does indeed make sense for the newly Gothamized AOL to use the domain in such a way. Maybe even too much sense, considering some of the company's faux pas in recent years.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington aptly points out, however, that there are plenty of other World of Warcraft social networks out there--then there's also the fact that the wildly popular online role-playing game from Blizzard, famously lampooned in South Park, is really sort of a social network in its own right.

But you've got to admit that there are some much more heavily clogged niches that AOL could've chosen to dive into with a hot domain name like that. You know, like social news.