Sony has provided a rare set of hard figures from the strange virtual economy of massively-multiplayer-online games (MMOGs). Its Station Exchange, the first ‘official’ online exchange for the virtual items in an online game - Everquest II - saw $1.87m worth of items and characters such as Dark Elves change hands in the first 12 months since its launch in mid-2005.

But given that there were - last time I checked - about 13m MMOGH players, that seems a little slim.

One member, Sony says, earned $37,435 in that year — but surely there are B-list bloggers who earn more than that?

Of course, World of Warcraft now eclipses Everquest in terms of players, and, more importantly, there are many unofficial online exchanges for all the elves, gold and swords you could ever wish for. However eBay is no longer one of them - last week it decided to prohibit sales of virtual game goods although it exempted Second Life, saying there was "an open question about whether Second Life should be regarded as a game."

[More analysis of the Station Exchange figures from Ralph Koster and the Indiana University crew. And some good overall MMOGH stats are available here, though they haven’t been updated for several months.]

Sometimes, even a blogging queen has to escape the blogosphere. Mena Trott, co-founder of the blogging company Six Apart, visited the FT’s London headquarters today – fortuitous timing for us, as it was hot on the heels of a storm about the Six Apart-sponsored conference held in Paris earlier this week, Le Web 3.

It’s the kind of saga that takes a dedicated blogosphere watcher to get excited about, but in a nutshell:

Some bloggers were unhappy with Le Web 3. The organisers disappointed a lot of attendees by making changes to the programme at the last minute to accommodate speeches from politicians: French presidential hopeful Nicholas Sarkozy, fellow French politician François Bayrou of the UDF, and former Israeli PM Shimon Peres. The collective finger of bloggers pointed firmly at Loic Lemeur, MD of Six Apart Europe. Sam Sethi of TechCrunch UK & Ireland was one of those to criticise the conference; you can read the full account here on GU but the upshot is that Sethi is no longer writing for TechCrunch, and indeed as of today, TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington has put the UK/Ireland website on hold.

Mena Trott herself was of course at the centre of a similar furore at last year’s conference (called Les Blogs), when she called an attendee, Ben Metcalf, an ‘asshole’ after he used the conference’ IRC ‘backchannel’ to label her speech "bullshit".

She hadn’t heard about Sethi being sacked and I was braced for a slightly uncomfortable exchange, but Trott seemed genuinely sanguine about the episode – and even a little amused that Loic had used the same word she had used last year.

She admitted, however, that while she would’ve liked to have spoken at Le Web 3, last year’s episode had given her “more stage fright than I would normally have”. And she is no longer an avid reader of tech blogs. “I’m so out of the loop, thankfully, about all this stuff.”

Unsurprisingly, Trott is sceptical about what the future holds for the A-list bloggers (perhaps not such a controversial view these days), noting acidly that most of the usual suspects are only too keen to get exposure in the mainstream media whenever they get a chance.