Remember, you experienced readers out there, I only recently got started with World of Warcraft :)
Since I'm a Troll, Origrimmar was the first "capital city" that I ran across in my travels and in my quests. Origrimmar is HUUUGE and there's a LOT of people running around. My computer doesn't do so well, and moving around is often frustrating because I get turned around in the wrong direction a lot. So, after having discovered it and checked it out a bit, I returned to The Crossroads and continued my adventuring from there.
I'm currently level 22, and it was only one level ago that I noticed the items in my inventory were giving me more information - specifically, if the title was white and the object was useful for some skill, it would list the skill. I'm not sure if that's a Cosmos UI add-on or if that's a World of Warcraft recent update... but I like it!
It's what encouraged me to try to sell linen cloth through the Auction House in Origrimmar... knowing that linen cloth was useful for tailoring, I knew someone would want it. So, my first sale to the WoW player market through the Auction House was 10 linen, whose buy-out price was 10 times the minimum bid price (a good starting place I figure).
My linen sold within minutes of me putting the auction place!! Someone bought out the auction entirely and I ended up with at least 10x the amount of money I would have gotten had I sold the linen to any of the regular shopkeepers around (which is what I did when I started).
The best thing about the whole auction process is that I don't even have to be there for it to happen. I don't have to be online when the buyer buys, because the cash and a sale notice is mailed to me and I can pick it up at my leisure. All I have to do is find an Auctioneer (like in Thunder Bluff, which is my favorite low-lag city to visit for both auctioning and Warsong Gulch gaming, which I'll write about in a future entry) or an Auction House like in Origrimmar, list my wares, and go from there!
I was interested to realize that while that patch 1.9 for the game opened a new area, in order for the players in various realms to get into this new area, each realm has to "prepare for war" which includes collecting a lot of supplies - food, ammunition/ores, first aid material, and the likes. That means that while your realm is collecting supplies, the raw materials for those supplies will likely sell for more money in the Auction Houses.
So, this "new" discovery has been wonderful for me. I spend some time killing humanoids and doing some quests, and instead of selling the wool and linen like I used to, I auction them off. I've been increasing the buy-out price for my auctions, because I'm finding the wool and linen auctions get bought out within an hour of my 8 hour auction. Mmmm, money.
Know what I spent a whole whack-load of my new-found cash on?
An 8-slot bag. Bah.