Moterus is a new social network just entering public beta. It also has a rather interesting audience in mind: bikers. Hoping to become the Internet's go-to site for all riders of two wheels, Moterus allows people to go beyond just keeping in touch with friends and passing around photos by allowing biking enthusiasts to discover and share routes they have found.

Does it sound odd for a social network to be targeting such a niche group? It's just a growing trend in new social networks. While it is unlikely a startup is going to compete well against the likes of Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and Tagged, there is still plenty of special interests that can be targeted.

For example, FanIQ is a social network for sports fanatics who want to spend their time answering trivia questions and making game predictions, while Ravelry is a knit and crotchet community. Heck, SoberCircle is even using social networking to help people kick their bad habits.

Read about more special interest social networks

Jolt Online Gaming announced today that it will be publishing Legends of Zork, a new browser-based game that brings the classic adventure game of the late 1970's into the modern era. Legends of Zork will be hosted at LegendsofZork.com and will be a persistent online adventure game, essentially a casual MMO that can be played from any computer or even an iPhone.

From the Legends of Zork press release:

"The Great Underground Empire has recently fallen and the land is in disarray. The Royal Treasury has been sacked. The stock market has collapsed, leading even mighty FrobozzCo International to fire employees from throughout its subsidiaries. A craze of treasure-hunting has swept through the remnants of the Great Underground Empire. The New Zork Times reports that trolls, kobolds and other dangerous creatures are venturing far from their lairs. Adventurers and monsters are increasingly coming into conflict over areas rich with loot. It's a dangerous time to be a newly-unemployed traveling salesman, but it's also a great time to try a bit of adventuring."

I remember playing Zork back in the days when running around the game meant typing "go north" into your computer. It will be good to see one of the classic adventure games of all time make a come back.

Suggested Reading:

• 8 Game Websites Gamers Should Bookmark
• Free Web Games and Web Arcades
• Classic Arcade Game Widgets

WebTV was one of the hot topics of the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show. And while the implementation was a bit different than WebTV's first stab at invading our living rooms -- this time WebTV is being integrated as part of the television set rather than as an additional box you hook into your TV -- the intent is the same.

So what has changed that would make WebTV a possible success now when it was doomed as a failure back then? Increased popularity of the Internet? Sure. But the Internet was a hot topic back in the 90's too. More to the point, society is simply ready for the Internet to jump out of their computers and invade other devices -- from mobile phones to video game consoles to cable boxes to television sets.

Back when the CD-Rom was just being introduced to computers, I had a vision of the computer melding with the entertainment system -- one box to rule them all. The CD-Rom introduced the idea of using your computer as a jukebox, and it was easy to see how movies were going to follow suit.

It took about a decade longer than I expected, but we've seen this happen in the past few years. The PlayStation 3 not only has the hard drive space to store a huge collection of music and movies, it's also a pretty good Blu-Ray player. And with Xbox Live's New Experience, you can now get movies on demand from Netflix through your Xbox 360.

Why couldn't this have happened earlier? The adoption of broadband Internet access helps, but the simple reason is that we simply weren't ready for it back then. Heck, many of us our still clinging onto our CD collection even though the birth of digital music signaled the death of the CD.

Will WebTV work out this time? Perhaps, but now how we think of it. The end result will be more of an Internet-enhanced television experience. If anything, it will be video game consoles that fulfill the merging of the computer, Internet, stereo and DvD all in to one handy device.

I guess everyone should be sending me their most heartfelt congratulations considering that I just won an email lottery. That's right, my email address was chosen from among half a million addresses to win a really great prize from Microsoft. Cool, huh?

There's a lot of really common web scams out there, and while we all think we'd never fall for one, the truth of the matter is that people fall for them all the time -- that's why we keep getting those scam emails sent to us.

Paul Gil, About.com's guide to Net for Beginners, has put together a fantastic Internet and Email Scams Guide that lists off the top ten scams from the Nigerian scam to phishing scams to disaster relief scams and make money fast scams.

Speaking of scams, I've long thought that one of the biggest scams in the world was being perpetrated by the mobile companies by charging 10-20 cents for an instant message. As a programmer, I know that not only are these messages small to begin with, but they also compress down to 1/20th of their original size, so they end up pretty miniscule. Of course, all of those millions of text messages do add up, but ten or twenty cents a message?

I always thought they were gouging people for sending those text messages, and it seems Yahoo Tech is starting to agree with me. Hopefully, the word will get out and we'll see those rates drop to a more reasonable level.