Dan O'Halloran

It’s been relatively quiet at WoW Insider. As Editor-in-Chief I do more planning and less writing than I used to. March was largely coordinating coverage of the latest World of Warcraft content patch currently on the testing realms. Also focused on ramping up our social media presence. We’ve always had a healthy Twitter and Facebook community, but we can definitely make those outlets more compelling and useful for our readers.

At Tecca, I continue to write the Tech For Parents column. The great thing about this column for me is that I get to draw from my real life experience as a father of two to pick and research topics. Recent columns include basketball tech for little hoopsters, astronomy tech for kids and an overview of the new Ninentedo 3DS to help parents decide if the new handheld gaming device is right for their children. MSNBC’s Today Show picked up on the 3DS piece and republished it on their site as well. I also got to mix my love of tech and massively multiplayer online games in a short news post on Tecca about RIFT‘s intergration of Twitter into the game.

Over at G4TV’s video game blog, The Feed, I’ve been continuing writing a weekly MMO column as well as reviews. I’ve been playing A LOT of the new fantasy MMORPG RIFT and was able to turn that into a column explaining the RIFT class system, an overview of the first month of the game and an official review of the title. I also wrote a round up of MMO news that came out of PAX 2011 which I hope one day to attend.

I’m also gearing up on transforming my Danomatic.com video game news aggregation site into a moblie gaming app news and review site. I strongly believe that gaming apps are the future of gaming and thus the future of gaming journalism. Plus, I can’t stop playing them, so I might as well write about them.

Today over at Massively, a site dedicated to news coverage of massively multiplayer online games, I debuted a new bi-monthly column covering Mobile MMOs called Massively Mobile. The first column covers the recent updates to the excellent action 3-D MMO Pocket Legends. Upcoming columns will look into other MMOs in the emerging mobile gaming app field including Anrufen Online, IMO and Outer Empires.

The other two weeks out of the month will see another new column I'm starting there, Facebook MMOgraphy. This will cover MMOs showing up on Facebook. This one is a harder call as to what constitutes an MMO since all Facebook games are social and multiplayer. I'm starting with City of Eternals from ohai for the debut of this column. Yes, I'm getting paid to play a vampire MMO. On Facebook. Don't hate.

Plants vs. Zombies is a Tower Defense style game that just came out as an iPhone app. Though it was released last year for the PC and Mac, I hadn't heard of it until now. And I can't stop playing the damn thing. I downloaded it to get me through a long day of jury service and played every day since. I'm sure I'll get over it soon. Just in time for Pop Cap to whip up a sequel since this first one is breaking download records.

I just finished a five week run on Massively's Lord of the Rings Online game column, The Road to Mordor. I'm very happy I was able to launch the column as I've been a fan of the game since it launched almost three years ago. The reins are being handed to a new hire while I will be focusing my efforts for the site on feature planning and event coordination.

• Community Guide to Lord of the Rings Online
• Volume 3 Book 1 Test Realm notes analyzed
• Volume 3 Book 1 new Skirmish gear rewards
• Community questions and answers
• Massively tour of Volume 3 Book 1